Brewing heir who raised the bar
BORN FEBRUARY 22, 1937 – DIED JANUARY 17, 2023, AGED 85
SIR SAMUELWhitbread sold the 18th-century family brewing business in a bold move to reap the rewards of building a giant hotel and leisure industry.
His forebear SamuelWhitbread formedWhitbread & Co in 1742 after buying several breweries. By 1750 it was the biggest brewer in the world, and had a new home in Chiswell Street, London.
Towards the end of the 18th century it was rolling out more than 200,000 barrels of beer a year and making a fortune.
Samuel Charles-Whitbread was born in London but had a distant relationship with his father Simon, who was on theWhitbread board as a non-executive.
After Eton and Cambridge, the brewery heir married Jane Hayter, whose father was a cattle breeder. Whitbread himself was a keen farmer of family land in Scotland and Herefordshire.
The couple had three sons and a daughter and enjoyed a more leisurely pace of life at their home in Southill, Bedfordshire.
Samuel became chairman of Whitbread in 1984 and encouraged relations with journalists at a time when the business was becoming more of a leisure conglomerate.
“The press didn’t know what to make of me,” he said. “They said, ‘how can a farmer become head of a large international drinks business?’ I was caricatured as a local, chewing a straw.”
However, he was taken more seriously after smooth takeovers of Pizza Hut, Beefeater Inn outlets and Threshers off-licences.
He left the chair in 1992 when Whitbread sold 2,000 pubs on the instruction of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. In 2001 he left the board when allWhitbread pub interests were sold.
A Bedfordshire Conservative councillor for many years, he was also the county’s lord lieutenant from 1991-2012. He is survived by his wife and their four children.