Thaddeus 'Todd' Bruno, Houghton deer park breeder obituary

Thaddeus “Todd” Bruno, who has died aged 80, was variously a soybean farmer, an advertising agent, the director of a Parisian art gallery and, latterly, an innovative breeder of fallow deer and the deer park manager at Houghton Hall, Norfolk.

He was born on September 21 1935 in Portland, Oregon, the son of a second generation Polish immigrant, Thaddeus Bruno, a successful real estate developer and civic leader, who had fronted campaigns for Nixon, Ford and Reagan and married a former Miss Oregon, Wanda Nadine Star, in 1934.

Todd’s parents divorced in 1941 and Todd moved with his mother and younger sister, Lynnda, to Palm Springs, California. After his mother remarried, he moved back to Oregon and eventually graduated from Oregon University, having also spent a year at Georgetown, Washington DC. He was among the first to be selected for a student exchange with the USSR, following the US-Soviet Cultural Exchange Agreement of 1958.

Spurning a career in his father’s business, Bruno went to Mexico to start a soybean farm with a college friend, but was forced to return home when he contracted hepatitis from contaminated peanuts.

Around 1960 he left for Europe, working successively for the Brenninkmeyer clothing company (then owners of C&A); as a freelance advertising agent in Düsseldorf and Munich; as director of a Parisian art gallery; and finally as adviser to his friend, Enrico Recchi, scion of an Italian construction company.

After Recchi acquired a Catalina flying boat, he and Bruno flew the aeroplane’s wartime trans-Atlantic route over Canada and Greenland, losing a pontoon, or “swimmer”, on the way. Recchi later died when attempting to land the Catalina at Turin airport in heavy rain.

In the mid-1970s Bruno became project manager on the construction of the Oberoi Hotel in Bali, adding Balinese to his fluent German, Spanish, Italian and French. However, he always considered himself a farmer, and in 1981 was invited by Baron Josef Kerckerinck zu Borg to run his cattle and deer operations at the Lucky Star Ranch in upstate New York.

In 1986 he moved to Britain, consulting for a number of deer parks, including the famous white fallow deer herd at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, owned by the Cholmondeley family.

Houghton became the first park in Britain to install proper handling facilities (to Bruno’s design), so that each animal could be weighed and tagged every year; and a number of research projects were subsequently undertaken with Cambridge University. One of these entailed satellite mapping of animal movements over a set period.

Around a dozen other species of deer – many of them rare such as Père David from China, and Sambar and Barasingha from India – were later introduced into the park, as well as a group of endangered Przewalski’s horses, originally from Mongolia, as part of a breeding programme with the John Aspinall Foundation at Port Lympne. The horses were later reintroduced into the wild.

Bruno organised several meetings of the British Deer Farmers Association at Houghton, and continued working to improve the herd until ill-health prevented him. For the last 30 years of his life, he considered Norfolk his home, and gathered an eclectic mix of friends around him.

His facility with languages and presence in various parts of the world during periods of upheaval, led many to conclude that he must be a CIA operative; an idea that he met with a characteristic laugh.

He did, however, admit to helping with private investigations into art thefts and was one of a team of detectives hired by the Pakistani authorities to investigate the assassination of Benazir Bhutto’s brother, though they were asked to leave before any useful information could be discovered.

In his spare time, Bruno was a keen amateur historian, and a (one-time) competition bridge player.

He never married, and is survived by his sister.

Thaddeus “Todd” Bruno, born September 21 1935, died August 9 2016

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