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29-09-2015, 08:20
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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 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.

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