Sir Gordon Brunton

Brunton was a formidable negotiator who was not easily diverted once he had made his mind up. Sir Harold Evans, a former editor of The Times and The Sunday Times, said: “He is a generous man, but not one to trifle with. He has a habit, when opposed, of lowering his large, domed forehead as if about to charge.”

In 1967 Thomson bought The Times from the Astor family, to reap the benefits of uniting it with his recently acquired Sunday Times. By then he had made Brunton chief executive. They became a formidable double-act as the company expanded into travel, oil, books, magazines and local directories — including Yellow Pages and the Illustrated London News.

Gordon Brunton, left, and Lord Thomson of Fleet in the 1960s

They did a little too well. Bringing The Times alongside The Sunday Times on Gray’s Inn Road, in central London, meant that the two sets of union chapels (local offices) combined their worst tactics of disruption. And, as the Thomson group started making millions from other activities, the print unions saw the opportunity to increase their demands.

When Roy Thomson died in 1976 his son, Ken, closed his wallet against the disruption and relied on Brunton to sort out the mess. As a condition of continuing to own the titles, Ken Thomson insisted on the introduction of new technology: computerised typesetting, directly input by journalists. When the typesetters’ union rejected these proposals, Brunton and Thomson closed The Times and The Sunday Times in December 1978, at least until an agreement was reached. Management, journalists and advertising staff were retained on full pay.

After 11 months the management achieved agreement on lower manning and higher productivity. The lockout had cost £40 million (equal to nearly £200 million today).

The next summer, the journalists were on strike over a 21 per cent pay rise. In a memoir, Brunton wrote: “That was the final straw. I met with my colleagues at my farm and advised Kenneth Thomson that we should withdraw from the national newspaper business. He agreed.”

This time Brunton meant business. He said: “I set a four-month time limit for the sale to be completed. If we did not manage to sell the titles, we would shut up shop and everyone would be dismissed. If there was any further disruption, we would cease publication and everyone would be dismissed.”

Several high-profile bidders showed an interest, including David Frost, Lord Matthews (then in charge of the Express group), Tiny Rowland, Robert Maxwell and Lord Rothermere. According to William Shawcross, Rupert Murdoch’s biographer, Brunton loathed Maxwell and distrusted Rothermere. In any case they were really only interested in the highly profitable Sunday Times. One suitor, Rupert Murdoch, was willing to meet the Thomson stipulation that the buyer must guarantee publication of The Times. He won in 1981 with a bid of £12 million and a share of future profits. The Gray’s Inn Road properties alone covered half of that. The negotiations had been so tough that, according to Brunton, “the walls dripped with blood”.

Gordon Brunton was born in London into a poor family, the son of Charles and Hylda. Charles was a cinema inspector. When Gordon was five, Hylda took him and eloped with Albert Godenir, a Belgian engineer. Hylda ran the Strollers Club in the basement of a London building, while Albert sat in the penthouse quaffing smoked salmon and champagne.

In Burma in 1942

Brunton attended Cranleigh School in Surrey, where he found the experience of boarding traumatic, and the London School of Economics. When the Second World War broke out the LSE decamped to Cambridge so, as well as being taught by Harold Laski, he was treated to the wisdom of John Maynard Keynes.

Before he could complete his degree Brunton was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1940 and served as a captain in the Indian Army, fighting in the Burma campaign. Afterwards, he was posted to the British Military Government in Hamburg and Dusseldorf to work on reconstruction.

There Brunton met Nadine Sohr, a Belgian nurse, whom he married in 1946. They had three children: Colin, who worked in the Middle East enforcing video copyrights; Gillian, who turned ruined buildings in Portugal into villas: and Alison, who married the lieutenant-governor of British Columbia.

After leaving the army Brunton returned to England. Tothill Press sent him door to door selling classified advertising space to small businesses. He stayed there nine years, rising to a directorship. He became managing director of Tower Press in 1958, and three years later an executive director of Odhams Press. After less than a year he switched to Thomson.

One of its early acquisitions, in 1962, was of a batch of magazines including the Illustrated London News. That was to throw Brunton into a confrontation with the royal family. The magazine had commissioned and published a series of innocent portraits of Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon and about 30 other royal family members. They had been drawn by Stephen Ward, the osteopath who became a central figure in the 1963 Profumo scandal involving the call girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. Ward was charged with living off immoral earnings, and during the trial he exhibited the portraits at a London gallery.

After representations from “the highest level”, which he promised never to reveal, Brunton sent an executive to the gallery to buy every royal portrait and load them into a taxi. The portraits lay in a vault for 30 years until the Illustrated London News changed hands and the new owner put them up for sale.

Roy Thomson soon spotted Brunton’s entrepreneurial flair, and gave him the job of diversifying from newspapers. Having been at the LSE with Vladimir Raitz — who was a catalyst for the modern package holiday industry with the launch of Horizon Holidays — Brunton saw that this business fitted the sort of model he and Thomson were looking for, and made a bid for Horizon. Raitz did not want to sell, but was willing to be a paid adviser. In the teeth of opposition from Thomson’s accountants, the company bought Riviera Holidays and Universal Sky Tours, which owned three second-hand aircraft, trading as Britannia Airways.

The business, as Thomson Travel, soon made worthwhile profits, but Brunton also discovered the risk of airline ownership. In 1966 one of the Britannias crashed in fog at Ljubljana airport in what was then Yugoslavia, killing more than 80 and leaving 30 badly burnt. Brunton flew to the site to organise the rescue and bring bodies back. “It was like a charnel house,” he said. “I had been through the war and was not unfamiliar with death and mutilation, but this was the most horrific experience of my life.”

Brunton’s personal life had by then undergone significant change. His marriage to Nadine was dissolved in 1965 and their three children stayed with him. A few months later, at the Monkey Island hotel on the Thames in Berkshire, he met Gillian Kirk through a mutual interest in liar dice. They married in 1966 and there were two children from that union. Mark worked on Racing Post, where his father was a director, and went into book publishing. Jane worked in sports travel and now raises a family in Surrey.

Brunton decided to retire from Thomson, after suffering acute appendicitis and peritonitis on a Concorde flight from the US. The surgery was a success, but he felt he had had enough. A year later he was knighted. He took a series of directorships, at first with bigger companies such as Sotheby’s the auctioneers and Cable and Wireless, and then at smaller boards including the loudspeaker firm NXT, the miner Galahad Gold and, pursuing his greatest hobby, Racing Post.

Brunton’s proudest moment on the racetrack was watching his Indian Queen, a rank outsider at 25-1, ridden to victory by Walter Swinburn in the 1991 Ascot Gold Cup. When he was indulging his other great pleasure, steering his motor launch Ocean Victory around the Mediterranean, he would often be on the phone checking how his horses were doing.

Brunton was no stranger to a glass of wine, and the trips were taken up with playing liar dice, backgammon, cards and boule. He was very competitive. After he had lost several games of backgammon with another friend, Robert Smith, who played at national level in Canada, Brunton said he couldn’t understand why. “It’s quite simple,” replied Smith. “I’m better than you.”

Brunton, who died from complications arising from surgery, went knowing that one of his horses, Munstead Star, had come second in the 3.50 at Leicester. His last words to his family were: “That’s fine. Don’t be late for dinner. Goodnight.”

Sir Gordon Charles Brunton, businessman and racehorse owner, was born on December 27, 1921. He died on May 30, 2017, aged 95