News30 June 2026 · Tadcaster · Samuel Smith's · By Sophie Ro

Humphrey Smith: British Beer's Great Awkward Character

Humphrey Smith, who has died aged 81, was one of the few people in British beer who felt less like an executive and more like a force of nature. Samuel Smith's under him was not just a brewery with a pub estate attached, but a stubbornly self-contained realm with its own rules, rhythms and refusals. Cheap pints, dark wood, old brewing kit, shire horses, silence where everyone else had screens and noise. For London drinkers, that meant places like the Cheshire Cheese, the Cittie of Yorke, the Princess Louise, the Chandos or the Crown & Sugarloaf still feeling like proper pubs rather than hospitality refits with better typography — Samuel Smith's runs around 36 of them in London alone, and hundreds more across the country. He held on to things that most pub companies would have ripped out, polished up or turned into a brand story years ago.

That doesn't make him a saint. Plenty of people thought he was overbearing, arbitrary and impossible, and there is no point pretending otherwise. Staff have their stories, customers have theirs, and so do villages left staring at boarded-up Sam Smith's pubs that seemed capable of staying shut for geological time. One of the most revealing stories in the Guardian piece was that he would personally turn up to interview pub managers, even arriving at a couple's caravan to do it, as if no detail was too small to fall outside his personal rule. Then there was the row at the New Inn over an air freshener allegedly tainting his half of Old Brewery Bitter, followed by changed locks and another pub dark again. He could come across as petty, theatrical, high-handed and utterly uninterested in whether anyone liked him.

But that same obstinacy is also why his pubs never felt as though they had been through the same corporate mincer as everything else. The brewery itself remained full of the sort of details that sound almost invented now: slate Yorkshire squares, coopers still making barrels, casks delivered locally by shire horse, water drawn from the limestone wells at Tadcaster. He seemed to want not just to run pubs, but to hold an entire atmosphere in place. Even Tadcaster was part of that instinct, with rows about cobbles, gas lamps and how the town ought to look. It was never just commerce with him. It was closer to private rule.

What made him unusual was not simply that he liked old things, but that he seemed willing to absorb real commercial pain in order to keep his corner of the world feeling as he thought it ought to feel. That is maddening in one light and admirable in another. He preserved a kind of pubgoing that had hush, texture and weight to it, even while making himself a byword for bloody awkwardness. Most businessmen spend their lives trimming themselves to fit the age. Humphrey Smith spent his doing the opposite.

Change is not entirely a future tense. His son, Samuel Smith, has been running the southern half of the estate — the London pubs among them — for some years, and by most accounts with a lighter hand than his father: less austere on the enforcement, more permissive around the rules. Sam is now widely expected to take on the wider brewery from Tadcaster. The dynasty carries on, but with the awkwardness dialled down.

Now the whole thing sits under him, Samuel Smith's will change further. Some of that will be welcome. Boarded-up pubs may reopen, the rules may soften, staff may breathe easier, and the whole enterprise may become less combative. Fair enough. But if the place ends up tidier, friendlier and more commercially sane, it may also lose the thing that made it memorable. Humphrey Smith left behind more than a brewery. He left behind a question — how much of that strange old world survives once the man who kept it in being is no longer there — and a son who has already started to answer it.

That is why his death feels significant. Not because he was lovable, and not because he was always right, but because he was unmistakably himself in a country increasingly run by people and companies that sound, look and behave exactly like each other. British pub culture has lost one of its great awkward characters. It may become easier without him. It will also be less peculiar.