John Smith acquisitions

John Smith was one of what I call the nearly men. Breweries that expanded rapidly in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but didn’t quite make the Big Six.

Though in a way they did. Because these large brewing groups became important chunks of the eventual winners. When Courage, Barclay & Simonds took them over in 1970, they brought 1,800 pubs with them.  That was around a third of the 6,000 tied houses the whole Courage group owner after the merger.

I have mixed feelings about John Smith. They closed one of the Newark breweries (Warwick & Richardson) and one of my all-time favourites (Barnsley). Then they phased out cask beer in the mid-1970’s. When I lived in a town where they owned 90% of the pubs. I say John Smith owned them and not Courage because they didn’t sell any products from the latter’s breweries.  I virtually never went in any of their Leeds pubs when I lived there. Because they didn’t do cask.

John Smith had quite a limited geographical spread. If you look at the breweries they bought, all are North of the Trent, except Warwick & Richardson which was on the river’s southern bank. It looks from their acquisitions that they traded in the North of the Midlands, Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Northeast.

I can see why Courage bought them. Until then, Courage was pretty much exclusively southern, with the exception of the pubs that came along with Hole’s of Newark. How ironic is that? The only place they overlapped was Newark, where I grew up. Otherwise, the two tied estates were complementary: Courage in the South, John Smith in the North. In my experience, the two parts of the company operated pretty separately all through the 1970’s.

I’ll finish with a nice table.

John Smith acquisitions
year	brewery	address	tied houses	closed
1919	Fernandes & Co	Wakefield	42	1919
1925	Warwick & Co	Boroughbridge	42
1926	Bentley’s Milnshaw Brewery Co	Accrington	12
1934	Haughton Road Brewery Co	Darlington	41
1941	H Shaw	Dunkinfield	60
1958	Whitworth, Son & Nephew Ltd	Wath upon Derne	165
1961	Barnsley Brewery Co Ltd	Barnsley	250	1976
1961	Yates Castle Brewery Ltd	Manchester	175 pubs in 1896
1962	Warwick & Richardsons Ltd	Newark		1966
Sources:
"The Brewing Industry a Guide to Historical Records” by Lesley Richmond and Alison Turton, 1990, page 303.
A Century of British Breweries plus by Norman Barber, 2005, pages 29, 66, 94. 160, 163 and 172.

I think I’ll continue the Courage theme with a look at the growth of Simonds.