Humphrey’s world: how the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain’s strangest pub chain | Food & drink industry

In early September 2022, Alivia Bienko and her husband, Liam, were driving through Stamford Bridge, an idyllic village on the River Derwent, near York, when a shuttered pub caught their eye. Stuck to one of the windows was an A4 sheet advertising for a couple to live in and manage the pub. On the advert was a mobile number for Samuel Smith, the brewery that owned the pub. Founded in 1758, Samuel Smith Old Brewery is one of the largest family-owned brewery and pub operations in the UK. Bienko had experience in hospitality, and she and Liam were open to a change. They decided to look into the job.

Online, they came across a few stories of couples who had been thrown out of their jobs running Samuel Smith’s pubs, largely for “missing money or missing beer”, Bienko said. Nothing unusual about that. But when the couple dialled the number on the advert, they were surprised to find themselves speaking to Humphrey Smith, the stupendously wealthy chairman of the company, who has been in charge since the 1970s. “He said, ‘I can come and meet you tomorrow’,” Bienko told me. “It was very odd and we were very nervous, because we were living in a small caravan and here was a millionaire coming to visit us.”

The next morning, Smith, a small man in his late 70s, dressed in a dark business suit, showed up at the couple’s caravan in the East Yorkshire countryside. Bienko recalled his rheumy eyes. Smith would be conducting their job interview personally, he told them. The meeting was strange. “It was like he was warning us,” Bienko said. “He was asking: ‘Are you sure it’s right for you?’.” The following day, Smith met them at the pub, the New Inn, and handed over the keys. Inside, the couple discovered the scale of the job ahead of them. “It was an absolute shambles. Two years’ worth of dust,” Bienko said.

Next came a weeklong training programme at the historic Samuel Smith brewery in Tadcaster, the North Yorkshire town that is the seat of the Samuel Smith empire. From 9 to 5 each day, an experienced manager instructed them in the art of running a pub. The couple received no pay for this training week. Questions about Humphrey Smith, or the brewery’s reputation for eccentricity, were batted away. “It was like everything was a big secret,” Bienko said.

On 17 September, the couple moved in to the New Inn. For 13 to 14 hours a day, they cleaned up. “The upstairs accommodation was absolutely disgusting,” Bienko said. “An awful smell and dead birds.” When they sought financial assistance from the brewery to pay for cleaning materials, Bienko says that they couldn’t get past Smith’s personal assistant.

On 24 September, just three weeks after they had first stumbled upon it, Bienko and Liam were opening the New Inn for business. One evening about a fortnight later, Smith walked in and ordered a half pint of Old Brewery Bitter. “He was in a good mood. He said we seemed to be doing well, business-wise,” recalled Bienko.

Two weeks later, Smith returned. Again he ordered his half of Old Brewery Bitter and took a seat in a corner of the pub where Bienko had installed an air freshener. Two other customers were in the pub and Bienko was behind the bar. For a time, all was calm. Then, all of a sudden, Smith became angry. “He said: ‘What is this? This is absolutely awful.’ He threw a tantrum,” Bienko said. Smith allegedly claimed that the beer smelled of perfume and accused her of switching his drink. “It was like he was putting on an act, or a circus show. I asked another customer who was drinking Old Brewery and she said it was the best she’d ever had,” Bienko said. “Mr Smith looked at me and said: ‘Are you telling me I’m lying?’ He sounded like a child.”

Two days later, representatives from Samuel Smith arrived to perform an inventory check. Accompanying them was a man who changed the locks. On 17 October, less than a month after Bienko and Liam had opened for business, the New Inn was closed. “It was a big shock,” said Bienko. Liam persuaded the locksmith to leave them access to the upstairs flat, where they were able to remain for a month. Samuel Smith returned the couple’s £1,000 deposit, but they received their wages only after Bienko lodged an unfair dismissal claim with the employment tribunal.

Two years on, the New Inn remains empty and a sign in the window advertises for a new management couple. But the story of the New Inn is not an anomaly. Samuel Smith Old Brewery owns more than 200 pubs across Britain, located as far north as Edinburgh and far south as Bristol. According to some estimates, more than half of these pubs are currently closed. The heart of the brewery is in North Yorkshire, where it owns 59 pubs. In September 2023, I phoned all 59 pubs and could only identify 19 that were certainly open. Nine months later, I phoned them all again and managed to speak to staff at 22 pubs. At 30 of them, I heard the same recorded message: “Unfortunately, the pub is currently closed. We hope to appoint a management team and open the pub as soon as possible.” At four pubs, the phone rang but no one answered. At the others, the phone line was dead.

Many of these pubs have been empty for more than five years. The majority are in villages that have no other pub. In Appleton Roebuck, Samuel Smith owns both the village pubs. Both are shut. Even the Crown Inn in Bolton Percy, where generations of Smith’s family have married and are buried in the churchyard, is shut. “It’s a massive issue for all these communities,” says Greg Mulholland, a former MP for Leeds North West and chair of the Campaign for Pubs. For local people in small towns and villages, the loss of their pub can feel like a bereavement. In Sheriff Hutton, near York, a group held a candlelit vigil for the Castle Inn when it was shuttered in 2021.

Over the past four decades, Humphrey Smith has almost singlehandedly shaped Samuel Smith Old Brewery. The value of his company’s holdings is staggering. In 2015, the London Economic website estimated it at £750m. Allowing for inflation, that would now be more than £1.1bn. Given the extensive land and property holdings, two operational breweries, export business, pub estate and other businesses, that does not seem unrealistic. Yet it is what Smith chooses to do with these assets that is most extraordinary. For he now presides over a vast empire of shuttered pubs and grand, empty buildings that generate no income. It is a strange kind of businessman who avidly accrues property, only to let much of it moulder – but Smith has a strong claim to being Britain’s strangest businessman.

Humphrey Smith does not speak to the press, and Samuel Smith Old Brewery did not respond to a detailed list of questions relating to this article. But clues about the man himself can be gleaned from his pubs. Until earlier this year, the Samuel Smith website quoted admiringly from The Moon Under Water, George Orwell’s 1946 essay about his ideal pub: a quiet place, free of “drunks or rowdies”, frequented only by regulars who sit in the same chair. “Its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian,” Orwell wrote. “It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries.”

It would seem that Smith has spent much of his life trying to make Orwell’s dream a reality. Samuel Smith pubs are, the brewery’s website declares, “havens from the digital world”. Televisions, laptops and mobile phones are banned. Customers who take out their phone for any reason other than to pay can expect a warning from the publican. Branding is forbidden: no T-shirts or signage out front bearing the Samuel Smith logo – and no indication that you’ve entered Humphrey’s domain.

To say that Samuel Smith Old Brewery prides itself on tradition is to wildly understate the intensity of its chairman’s longing for a different era. His aim seems to be to build an entire world in which the past – or at least, his idealised picture of the past – is preserved just as it was. For decades, Smith has used his considerable personal means to pursue this vision. He seems to regard his properties as stage-sets, on which people – pubgoers, managers, local residents – must perform the roles he assigns to them, exactly as he directs. Where this is not possible, the curtain instantly falls. (Think of it as something like Synecdoche, North Yorkshire.)

The pubs, of course, are testament to this curious project, but so, too, is Tadcaster itself. Much of the town has been owned by the brewery since the 19th century. Of late, Smith has attempted to exert his influence in a complicated dispute over the development of the town centre. Smith insists that the town honour a nearly half-century-old pledge to pedestrianise the central streets, pave them with cobblestones and use only gaslit lamps – a view the town council does not share. When we spoke, Chris Metcalfe, a Tadcaster town councillor, compared life under Smith to feudalism: “A Selby planning officer once said to me, ‘Market forces don’t work in Tadcaster, because there’s only one landlord.’”

In the centre of Tadcaster stands a six-storey tower, a monument to Samuel Smith Old Brewery’s time-honoured brewing methods. Ingredients for the beer – malted barley, hops – are processed at different levels of the tower before being mixed in traditional Yorkshire squares, tanks made from slate, for fermentation. The brewery offers a wide range of beers, from Yorkshire Stingo, a 9% ABV beer matured in 100-year-old casks, to lagers such as Alpine. Their primary cask ale, Old Brewery Bitter, is stored in barrels made by a pair of coopers employed by the company. From there, it is delivered to Samuel Smith pubs in Tadcaster and the nearby village of Stutton via cart, pulled by two shire horses stabled inside the brewery. The draymen who drive the carts and tend to the horses are also employees of the company.

Inside the pubs, efforts to procure any snack, spirit or beer not made by Samuel Smith will prove futile. All beers on tap are brewed in Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery, using water drawn from Tadcaster’s magnesium limestone natural wells. Even the potatoes for the crisps in its pubs come from Yorkshire. The brewery keeps prices low: outside London, pints remain in the £2.40-£3.50 range. In exchange for the savings, drinkers must submit to Humphrey’s law.

There are strict rules for how patrons should conduct themselves. The Samuel Smith website specifies that drinks should be enjoyed in a “responsible” manner. “Friendly pub conversation is encouraged” but swearing is forbidden. In June 2017, patrons were ejected from the Arlington Hotel, a Samuel Smith pub in North Yorkshire. “I had just called in for a couple of pints,” one local man told the Gazette Live. “Next thing, the door burst open and this man started shouting the Samuel Smith policy on swearing. He said he had been outside and heard somebody swear. Then he turned to the girl behind the bar and said, ‘Shut this bar and get these out.’” The Arlington is now shuttered.

Attempts to control customers’ behaviour have occasionally made national headlines. In 2011, one Samuel Smith pub, the John Snow in Soho, became notorious when it ejected two men who were kissing. The incident sparked spirited protests, including a mass same-sex “kiss-in” outside the pub. Samuel Smith offered no comment or explanation.

Of the 20 or so people I spoke to about Humphrey Smith – business partners, those close to the family, residents of Tadcaster and its surrounding villages, industry experts – few dared speak on the record. The code of omertà extended to Smith’s peers among the landowners of North Yorkshire. Many people mentioned that Smith is litigious. One warned me to expect a letter from Mishcon de Reya, a well-known law firm, should I even attempt to value the Smith businesses. Another asked not to be quoted because he was about to make an application to extend his home, which is in a village near Tadcaster. Smith is notorious for contesting local planning applications.

Despite his secrecy, from these interviews and the public record, a clear enough picture of Smith emerges – one that sheds light on the unusual way he runs his company. He is famously parsimonious, a trait much admired in Yorkshire. He lives frugally in a small part of Oxton Hall, the stately but threadbare Queen Anne-style home where he grew up and now shares with Julia, his wife of 40 years. Oxton Hall was acquired by Humphrey’s grandfather, Samuel Smith, in 1919. The listing at the time gave some idea of the grandeur of the mansion, park and “pleasure grounds” that constituted the beautiful estate. There was a conservatory, pigeon house, summer house, a rose garden with pergolas, a fountain and a croquet lawn.

A native Tadcastrian, Smith spent his younger years cultivating a love for country pursuits such as shooting and fishing on the family estate. Those who have known the Smith family for a long time told me that he did not much enjoy his time at Eton College, where he boarded from 1958 to 1963 alongside snobby boys who looked down on him as a brewer’s son from the industrial north. Upon leaving Eton, Smith worked with his father, Geoffrey, at the family business, learning how a traditional brewery worked from top to bottom. In May 1965, when Humphrey was 20, Geoffrey was walking down Tadcaster High Street when he had a sudden heart attack and died.

For a few years, the brewery was left in the hands of executors and solicitors, before Humphrey and Oliver, his younger brother, gradually assumed the reins, taking full control by the early 1980s. Humphrey has long served as the company’s chairman and area manager for the North and Scotland, while his son Samuel, a fellow Old Etonian, oversees the empire’s southern realm, including its 39 London pubs. (While Oliver remains a director of the brewery, he began stepping back from the day-to-day businesses in the early 2000s.)

Humphrey Smith starts each morning by walking a mile to his office at the brewery in Tadcaster, a route that takes him over a bridge across the busy A64 dual carriageway. It is said that he once walked the seven miles from York station to his home rather than pay for a £20 taxi. He no longer drives, preferring to use his bus pass to get around when needed.

Smith is deeply religious – something of a family inheritance, as his maternal grandfather served as the bishop of Selby. He espouses a Christian opposition to premarital sex and divorce. According to multiple sources, on one occasion he chose to sleep in his car rather than share a house with a woman whose parents were divorced.

Smith is not without his admirers. He can be generous: in the early 1990s he donated a portion of his land for the construction of the Tadcaster community swimming pool. He has also been known to offer rent-free accommodation to acquaintances who have fallen on hard times – the renowned scholar and translator Bruce Wannell was one recipient of such charity. During my reporting, I encountered stories of Smith’s loyalty. Paul Phillips, a shopkeeper in Long Marston, a village near Tadcaster, told me about his brother-in-law, who had worked for the brewery. When he died, Phillips was stunned to see Smith at the funeral.

“To say that Humphrey is eccentric is an understatement,” said Charles Finkel, an ebullient American businessman who has worked with Samuel Smith since the 1970s, importing and distributing its beer in the US. But, Finkel continued, there was much more to Smith. He described him as “a man of his word” and “a workaholic, obsessively devoted to the long-term success of the company, plus a revered boss to the people who I have come to know”.

For almost a decade, journalists have had to rely on the accounts of outsiders for a sense of how the Smith family runs its business. The last time anyone had a glimpse inside was in 2015, when Samuel, Humphrey’s son, gave an interview to Glynn Davis, a writer for All About Beer, a trade publication. Davis told me that Samuel was happy to discuss the beers but no questions on sales, volumes or strategy were permitted. Samuel’s pride in their beers was evident. “We love being unique and quirky and hate the idea of being boring,” he said. “We’re also not interested in what other people say about us, that’s just other people’s views.”

To understand the way Smith rules his decaying kingdom, it is crucial to grasp the single-minded way he built it. After inheriting the family business, he went on a property-buying binge. From 1979 to 1984, his company acquired at least 10 historic pubs across London, ranging from bucolic cottages to a resplendent 19th-century gin palace. They included the riverfront Captain Kidd in Wapping, Ye Olde Swiss Cottage at Swiss Cottage, the Princess Louise in Holborn, and Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, once a haunt of Dickens, Trollope, Johnson and WB Yeats. As if heralding a Yorkshire invasion, the brewery often re-christened its new purchases: the Tudor Rose became the Rose of York, Henekey’s Long Bar on High Holborn became the Cittie of Yorke.

Smith’s appetite for historically or architecturally significant real estate led him to expand the Samuel Smith empire into other cities, such as Bath and Bristol. It was during this period that Samuel Smith Old Brewery purchased Nun Appleton Hall, one of the finest old houses in North Yorkshire, for £1.2m. Built in the 17th century, it was once a magnet for scholars of the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, who wrote an epic poem about its gardens while living there as a tutor for the daughter of a civil war general, Thomas Fairfax. The owner of the house before Smith, Joan Dawson, used to host annual pantomimes and summer fetes for local children on the property. A Marvell scholar once wrote that Dawson was “the soul of hospitality” who had “entertained generations of scholars, schoolchildren, and people just ‘Marvelling’”. After Samuel Smith took ownership of the house, the grounds and bridleways – which had been used for centuries by local riders – were closed off. The grand house became derelict. Fairly recent images and videos, taken by self-described urban explorers and posted to Facebook and YouTube, show damp and ransacked rooms, rotting wallpaper falling from walls, and collapsed ceilings.

The former King Edward’s school, a grand Georgian building in Bath that Samuel Smith purchased in the 1980s, has experienced a similar fate. Plans to convert it from a school to a licensed premises were submitted and withdrawn twice, before being submitted again and approved in 2009. Despite planning permission, the work has never commenced. The building, which has sat empty for nearly four decades, is on the English Heritage register of significant historic buildings “at risk” of irreversible decay.

As Samuel Smith expanded its portfolio of historic properties, the Smith family were also buying up more modern commercial buildings. After Margaret Thatcher’s government established the London Docklands as an “enterprise zone” which offered tax breaks to businesses setting up there, the family seized the opportunity to acquire, via one of their companies, two blocks of flats in Wapping opposite the Captain Kidd. They also scooped up commercial properties in Soho, Leicester Square and Victoria, as well as in Altrincham near Manchester, and Wetherby, north of Leeds.

During these years of aggressive expansion, Humphrey Smith revealed a bold plan to centralise control of his empire – and to do so under near-total secrecy. The brewery had long operated as a standard limited liability company, until, in 1982, the directors made the extraordinary decision to incorporate Samuel Smith as an unlimited liability company. This meant that the directors would no longer be required to disclose the capital worth of the business. In return for total privacy and greater freedom for moving capital, the owners became personally liable for all of the company’s debts and losses. This level of personal risk explains why fewer than 0.2% of the UK’s 5.6m registered companies are organised in this manner. After 1982, the value of the Smith family businesses vanished from public view. The last available picture of the company’s accounts – now more than four decades old – showed a turnover of £26m, with the total worth of the brewery’s assets at a further £20m.

This was a period where Humphrey Smith’s desire for total control over his domain was becoming increasingly evident. In September 1984, Samuel Smith announced a move that, in the words of one prominent industry publication, amounted to “one of the biggest bombshells in the history of the trade”. At the time, most brewery-owned pubs in the UK were “tied”, an arrangement that allowed publicans to sell a brewery’s beer without being a formal employee of the brewery. Nearly all licensees in tied pubs were tenants, enabling them to live in the pub and make their own business decisions, so long as they sold the brewery’s beer. Now Samuel Smith decided that it would convert the managers of its pubs from contractors into direct, salaried employees and remove the freedoms traditionally afforded to landlords. Everything from décor to snacks would be centrally mandated.

The National Union of Licensed Victuallers, the trade union representing more than 30,000 pub landlords at the time, declared its “incredulity and disbelief” that its members were faced with a choice of leaving their homes and jobs, or taking direct orders from Samuel Smith’s HQ. The brewery went ahead anyway.

One Spring morning, I sat in the nave of the Norman church in Long Marston where the village’s archives are kept. I was looking for a folder devoted to the history of the village pub, the Sun Inn, which has been owned by Samuel Smith since at least the 1950s. For all but one of the past eight years, the pub has been shuttered.

It is hard to capture what is lost when a local pub is shut. Tucked among the oral histories of previous landlords, I found an old photo of a young man called Miles Pennett wearing a fancy waistcoat, surrounded by bandmates and playing an accordion at a very boozy-looking party. Now in his late 40s, Pennett still lives in Long Marston. As a local myself, I’d known Pennett for a few years, but I had no idea how central to his life the pub had been until we spoke about it last year. The Sun Inn was where he met Hollie, his future wife. His brother also met his wife at the pub. “You talked to whoever came in,” Pennett told me. He missed the place. The couple who ran the pub for almost a decade used to host a pensioners’ Christmas party, they raised money for the local primary school and organised a local fantasy football league. Another Long Marston resident, who would only speak anonymously, for fear of being barred from a nearby Samuel Smith pub, was more forthright about its closure: “A local brewer has let down its local people. Our village has a lot of collective memories in the pub and it’s just been left to rot.”

One reason so many Samuel Smith pubs are shuttered is how difficult it is for the brewery to find staff willing to accept the diktats of Humphrey Smith. In 2019, Smith sacked Eric and Tracey Lowery, the couple managing the Fox and Goose in Droitwich Spa, reportedly after he overheard a customer tell his wife a dirty joke. “He said he heard a man talking to a woman and the man swore. It wasn’t aimed at him,” one witness told the Mail Online. “He’s shut the pub for one swear word.”

Over time, Smith’s preferences seem to have grown increasingly tyrannical. In November 2019, he shuttered the Cow and Calf outside Sheffield after he was informed it would be unable to produce a chocolate fondant, his favourite dessert. In March 2023, signs appeared at the Boot and Shoe in Tockwith warning children against convening inside the pub. In the beer garden, children were required to stay sitting at tables.

Some pub managers have tried to fight back, filing unfair dismissal claims with the UK employment tribunal. But most cannot afford to hire a lawyer, meaning they must represent themselves. And many seem unaware that they have no statutory employment rights until they’ve been in the job for at least two years. The brewery, meanwhile, can afford to pay for top lawyers. In the 30 tribunal cases brought against Samuel Smith since February 2017, it has won 21 times. In the nine cases where the brewery has lost, a total of about £130,000 in lost wages and damages has been paid to former staff. (In the same period, Shepherd Neame, a slightly larger brewery than Samuel Smith, was taken to just one tribunal.)

While it might seem that the scales are always tipped in its favour, Samuel Smith does not always win. In 2015, the pensions regulator required the brewery to show that it had sufficient funds to meet its obligations to its employees. Humphrey Smith responded personally: “We are in receipt of your tiresome letter and we are not prepared to divulge the information to your organisation.” On this occasion, Smith’s desire to write his own rules met its match. The regulator initiated court proceedings. The brewery capitulated and disclosed the documentation, but too late. Smith was charged for non-compliance “on the basis that he consented to or connived in the offence by the company, or caused it by his neglect”. He was convicted and fined £8,000, and Samuel Smith Old Brewery was fined £18,750.

One day in early October 2024, I drove to Tadcaster. I’d visited many times before, and was familiar with the several tall brewery chimneys standing sentinel over the town centre. This time, the sense of dereliction struck me harder than usual. Boarded-up properties dot virtually every street in central Tadcaster: six on Kirkgate, a main thoroughfare, 10 on the High Street, two on Chapel Street, and two more on Commercial Street. Almost all of these properties are owned by Samuel Smith. The Angel and White Horse, Samuel Smith’s flagship brewery pub, occupies a prime site on the High Street. It is one of four shuttered Samuel Smith pubs in the town.

Humphrey Smith’s attachment to particularly fine historic properties, and his complementary intransigence on the correct way to run and restore them, often puts him at odds with planners and government officials. It was six years ago that I first became interested in writing about his empire, when a lawyer told me that Samuel Smith kept a leading planning barrister on retainer. This seemed quixotic, bordering on insane: planning barristers are expensive and Smith is a brewery owner, not a planning authority. But as I looked into the history of disputes in which the brewery had been involved, I realised I was tracing an unusually deep obsession.

When Samuel Smith has restored properties, it has done so with great care. In 1995, it restored the 13th-century Old Vicarage in Tadcaster, a Grade II*-listed building, making it habitable once again. The renovation was done “to a very high standard”, says Peter Johnston, a former contractor who worked on the job. When the restoration was complete, the vicar of the local church was told that her new home was ready for her, according to a report in the Times. Having not previously been informed that the restoration was for her benefit, she declined to move. The vicarage was locked up and has been uninhabited for the past 29 years.

It isn’t just that Humphrey wants to build and run his properties and pubs exactly as he pleases. For decades, he has also been waging, through his company, a multi-front war against local planners, preventing councils, individuals and other companies from developing their land and properties. When I asked the planning inspectorate, which handles appeals against planning permission, for documents relating to cases involving Samuel Smith Old Brewery, they deemed my request impractical. Why? Because, they said, they held 13,000 such documents.

Among other proposed developments, the brewery has objected to the re-use of old buildings at a local coalmine, the relocation of the Thursday market in Tadcaster, and the construction of a water-pumping station. As well as Selby council, this crusade against modern development has brought Smith into disputes with Harrogate council, North Yorkshire county council, Edinburgh city council, Cleveland and Redcar council, the secretary of state for communities and local government, and the National Grid. In 2019, the brewery’s case against Selby district council’s plan to expand a quarry in Tadcaster reached the supreme court, where it was settled in favour of the council. (Peter Village KC, who acted on behalf of Samuel Smith in most of these cases, declined to comment.)

For private individuals going up against Samuel Smith, the consequences can be grave. In 1999, it launched a legal challenge against Ian and Kathryn Hutchinson, a farming couple hoping to open an equestrian centre near Tadcaster. The company argued that the council should not allow large new buildings to dot the countryside and potentially spoil the pleasant landscape. It was the beginning of a decade-long legal battle. In 2009, the Hutchinsons finally won, but it was a pyrrhic victory. The seven court appeals filed by Samuel Smith had bled the couple’s finances dry, ultimately forcing them to sell their farm.

Richard Harwood KC, who has followed what he calls the “epic” history of Samuel Smith’s planning disputes, described this sort of litigation as “very unusual”. It is also costly for the public, with judicial review of each case that reaches the high court running anywhere from £50,000 to £100,000, Harwood said. Much of that is recovered from the council if the claim succeeds – in other words, the public foots the bill. In legal battles with multiple claims, appeals and reviews, and with each side awarded costs at different stages, the bill racks up, even in cases where the final decision goes the way of the council. According to a BBC report from 2009, the Hutchinson case cost the council half a million pounds.

On 12 December 2024, Humphrey Smith turned 80. According to numerous reports, he will retire this month. Few can say what his departure will mean for the future of his company but Samuel, his son, will have considerable resources at his disposal when he takes his seat in the Victorian boardroom in Tadcaster occupied by his father for nearly 60 years.

In Humphrey’s final months in charge, the brewery’s capricious behaviour towards managers does not seem to have abated. In September, the Shoulder of Mutton in Bradford city centre was shuttered without warning. In November, the Wellington Inn in York was closed and the popular landlady, Sue Frost, ejected with less than 24 hours’ notice. A local councillor, Conrad Whitcroft, wrote an open letter to Smith requesting Frost’s reinstatement and describing his behaviour as “reminiscent of Scrooge”.

There have been hopeful developments, too. In Long Marston, contractors have spent recent months renovating the Sun Inn. Local people hope it will open, but they know how Humphrey Smith can be. Likewise, for the first time in 40 years, work is under way at Nun Appleton Hall to restore it to its former glory. This summer, I heard that a Tadcaster local had asked Smith about the building work. “I wish I’d never started,” he allegedly replied. It will cost a king’s ransom.

Throughout the months I have worked on this article, I have tried to gain a sense of why Humphrey Smith rules his empire as he does. Perhaps it’s as simple as a desire to turn back the clock to an earlier period, when business owners ruled their realm as they pleased, even if that meant self-destruction. Even so, one mystery has continued to dog me: his obsession with blocking development in the green belt. Why would a man behave so aggressively, causing distress to so many, costing his own businesses many millions of pounds in the process? What could have been the origin of this obsession?

One day in September, I walked towards Oxton Hall. As I crossed the bridge over the A64 – the same bridge Smith crosses on foot every day on his way to work – I began to toy with a theory. It went back to the origins of this very bridge.

In February 1972, the Department of Transport announced plans to build a stretch of dual carriageway that would bypass the centre of Tadcaster and its struggling single-lane roads. The department considered a number of different routes and announced a planning inquiry, which began later that year. At the National Archives in Kew, a fat file of documents contains the written records of the inquiry. A leading barrister, who was representing Samuel Smith, called expert witnesses to make the case for the brewery’s preferred route, which would ensure that the busy road would not come near Oxton Hall. The company must have spent a fortune on making their case. Oliver Smith attended every day of the inquiry, but Humphrey did not. I suspect, though it is pure speculation on my part, he couldn’t bear it.

Despite their outlay, the brewery was not successful. The Department for Transport acquired, by compulsory purchase, a section of the Oxton Hall estate. Smith could only watch as hundreds of trucks were driven through the bucolic estate he had grown up on. In August 1978, the bypass finally opened, separating Oxton Hall from its parkland and from Tadcaster.

The Labour government had built a busy road at the bottom of Humphrey Smith’s garden on the advice of a planning expert, and there was nothing he could do about it. His childhood home was invaded by planners who claimed to be bringing progress. Ever since, Smith has militantly resisted both planners and progress. He has built an alternative world, one whose every aspect he tries to control. And if the little king cannot do as he pleases, everyone else can go hang.