Bernard Matthews: Is he stuffed?

He survived the foot-and-mouth crisis, animal rights protests, the anti-GM lobby, takeover bids - and the wrath of Jamie Oliver. But will Bernard Matthews ever recover from the outbreak of bird flu that threatens to devastate his £400m turkey empire? Paul Vallely asks if the 76-year-old tycoon's chickens have finally come home to roost

The dictionary defines schadenfreude as the malicious enjoyment of another's misfortunes. Bernard Matthews may be the target for such uncharitable sentiments today. It was on one of his 57 farms, at Holton in Suffolk, that Britain's first case of the H5N1 strain of bird flu broke out last week, killing 2,600 turkeys and leading to the slaughter of 159,000 more.

The 22 low, dimly lit giant sheds that housed the birds are now at the centre of concerns about the arrival in the UK of a strain of avian flu that has already killed 164 people elsewhere in the world, and which scientists fear might mutate into an antibiotic-resistant strain, triggering a fatal epidemic in which millions could die.

Yet, if the doomsday scenario is on hold just at present, that is in part down to the bucolic figure of Matthews, which, for many people, turns potential tragedy into bathos. Matthews remains, thanks to the British sense of snobbery, a figure of fun, what with his tweedy-suited adverts and the thick Norfolk burr in which he pronounces his products to be "bootiful" (or "flu-tiful", as the wags now have it).

But there is something terribly serious about Matthews, or what he represents about modern society. For he is a symbol of the hypocritical consumerism that professes concern about animal rights even as it demands ever-cheaper food - and then throws up its hands in horror at the consequences of this paradox.

Matthews, as his country-bumpkin accent implies, is from a pretty rough background. His dad was a struggling mechanic and his mum a housekeeper in the Norfolk village of Brooke, where young Bernard was born in 1930. He was a clever lad, whose head for figures won him a scholarship at the City of Norwich school. But he did not thrive there, and rather than allow the boy to dilute the examination pass-rate, the headmaster refused to allow him to sit any.

He left school with no qualifications and, at 16, spotted a job as an apprentice at a firm of rural auctioneers. One day, at Acle market, he saw 20 freshly laid turkey eggs for sale and bought them for a shilling each. Also for sale that day, in another part of the market, was a small, paraffin-oil incubator, which he bought for £1 10s. He decided to try to hatch and rear them to supplement his meagre apprentice's wage.

Today, Bernard Matthews Ltd is a £400m company, Britain's ninth-biggest food brand (one place behind McVitie's), with 6,000 employees. It is the biggest turkey producer in Europe (some say in the world), and easily the biggest UK brand in cooked meats. As well as virtually single-handedly creating the UK frozen poultry market, Bernard Matthews is one of the chief financiers of the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme, for which he was appointed CBE in 1992 and CVO - a personal award of the Queen - in the last honours list. For all that, he is not even included in Who's Who, and a distinct superciliousness characterises much of the comment about him.

The business began, it is recalled, when he took his incubator and 20 eggs and installed them in the garden shed at the house of his future mother-in-law, just outside Norwich. Then, after spending his evenings and weekends tending the birds, he and his wife, Joyce, bought Great Witchingham Hall, a derelict mansion with 36 acres of land deep in the Norfolk countryside, where the couple lived in two rooms (cooking over an upturned electric fire) while the 30-odd bedrooms of the Tudor pile were filled with stinking turkey chicks.

Yet it was from Great Witchingham Hall - now restored as the headquarters of the company - that Matthews transformed the British meat market over the succeeding four decades. First, he built the conventional business until, in 1960, he entered The Guinness Book of Records as the biggest turkey farmer in Europe. He was producing a million birds a year when, later that decade, he was approached by the Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev to modernise the Russian poultry industry.

But he did more than just grow in size. His commercial canniness took a product that was, until the late Seventies, a once-a-year Christmas treat and turned it into a cheap meat for the masses.

If there was a comic overtone to the adverts with which he launched his pre-packed Turkey Breast Roast in 1980, there was real professionalism in the way he invested £500,000 in an advertising campaign to shift the new product - which, until he approached a leading London advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, had been piling up in an unsold £2m meat mountain in his cold stores.

The advert, in which Matthews appeared in a tweedy Norfolk check jacket and plus-fours, said "jolly farmer" and "home cooking" to the viewer. But to the business world, it heralded the arrival of a slick operator who shifted the emphasis of a business which, before 1979, had been 90 per cent oven-ready turkeys, and opened up a whole new avenue with innovative hi-tech products that did little to impress the gourmet but which were pioneers in the British ready-food revolution.

He invented the "self-basting" Golden Norfolk Turkey, to address the bird's tendency to produce dried-out meat. And he followed that over the next two decades with products rejoicing in names such as Turkey Breast Roast, Turkey Fillets, Crispy Crumb Turkey Steaks, Golden Drummers, Mini Kievs and - dubious though middle-class parents may have found it - the UK's first shaped poultry product for children, Turkey Dinosaurs.

There were controversies aplenty. In 2000, the environmental activists Greenpeace delivered three tons of GM-free turkey feed to the Bernard Matthews headquarters to disprove his contention that it was impossible to buy GM-free animal feed. Within a year, the firm had done a U-turn and declared that the eight million turkeys it farms every year in the UK were fed a "strictly vegetarian diet of non-GM crops" from the company's own feed-mills.

Then, in 2005, another of its products - Turkey Twizzlers - became the object of the chef Jamie Oliver's scorn. He singled them out for criticism in his campaign to improve the nation's school dinners in his television series Jamie's School Dinners. The product, in which processed turkey was combined with pork fat, contained - Oliver complained - outrageously unhealthy levels of saturated fat. The firm dropped the product, a move that coincided with a £13m drop in operating profits.

Yet such righteous opprobrium has not been able to undermine Bernard Matthews Ltd's position as the biggest and most successful turkey producer in Europe. It is the brand leader in Hungary and Germany, and it has three plants in New Zealand that process 1.4 million lambs a year for export to Europe, the United States, Japan and the Middle East. And, even if the staff at the afflicted farm and plant at Holton are reported to be mainly Portuguese these days (along with a sprinkling of Eastern Europeans and Africans as well as local Britons), one-third of all the birds that British households tuck into on Christmas Day are now "bootiful" birds.

In 2000, the company fought off a takeover attempt by the giant US food multinational Sara Lee. A year later, Matthews and his family engineered a move to remove the firm from its stock-market listing and to revert to limited company status, with ownership returning to the Matthews family.

The result is that Matthews, now 77 - and with a comparatively modest lifestyle for a tycoon; just the Cessna private jet (he's sold his 160ft ocean-going motor yacht the Bellissima, which means "really bootiful" in Italian) and the villa in St-Tropez - owns 95 per cent of the business today. That makes him personally worth about £300m.

Yet if Matthews is, in business terms, far from the comic-book figure many suppose, that is not to say there aren't concerns about the wider impact of his business. There are animal welfare issues. Last year, two of his employees at Beck Farm in Felthorpe, near Norwich, were convicted of animal cruelty after being filmed playing "baseball" with live turkeys. A vet who viewed the tape described the abuse as hideous, the worst he had seen in his 25-year career. The men's defence lawyer stated that their actions were influenced by "peer pressure" and part of a "culture" at the Norfolk plant.

The firm responded by taking out a full-page newspaper advertisement telling shoppers: "Our employees do not abuse turkeys." The men had left the company and other staff had been warned that cruelty to farm birds would result in dismissal.

That did not allay wider fears. A couple of years earlier, the television programme GMTV had broadcast a video made by undercover animal-welfare investigators showing birds packed into overcrowded, darkened sheds in a Matthews factory. Some of the turkeys lay injured and dying.

The firm retorted that the video-makers caused the injuries seen in the footage by panicking the birds, although the undercover activists dispute this. Conditions in its farms and plants, Bernard Matthews Ltd insists, are better than in many other intensive poultry operations, and it stresses that it has extended a standing invitation for government and local authority vets and the RSPCA to visit the sheds at any time, with no prior notice.

Even so, campaigners expressed concern about birds condemned to live their brief lives - usually less than six months - densely packed inside windowless sheds with nothing to do except eat and shuffle around in the gloom. (The lighting is low because this keeps the birds docile and prevents them attacking and pecking one other, but it can also make the turkeys blind.) Selective breeding - to ensure the birds put on large amounts of weight in a short time - means that their immature legs often cannot support their weight, and many develop infected knee joints, dislocated hips and other leg problems.

In the past, the firm has maintained that indoor rearing is the only option. Turkeys kept outside, it says, will pick up fatal infections from migrating birds and other sources. "The only way you can do it outside is to feed the birds a lot of drugs, all the time, to stop them getting disease," Bernard Matthews has said. The events of last week cast doubt on such defences.

But there is a wider cost to this industrialisation of agriculture, pursued to provide the nation with cheap food. Antibiotics used to try to stop infections sweeping through the crowded sheds - and to promote growth - are implicated in the rise of superbugs. One government inquiry has suggested that 50 per cent of the sharp decrease in human immunity to disease is due to the routine use of antibiotics in intensive livestock production.

The majority of scientists suspect that the avian flu strain detected in Holton has arrived there via the migration of wild birds from a remote body of water in north-west China called Qinghai Lake, where thousands of wildfowl died from the virus in the summer of 2005. Birds from there would spread the virus, it was predicted, as they returned to their wintering grounds.

This seems to be exactly what has happened; the path of the disease can be traced through the progressive westward movement of wild flocks through Russia, Turkey, Romania, Egypt, and then to Europe, to Germany and then France. But there is another theory. Some scientists fear that, although the virus originated in the wild, the highly pathogenic strains of bird flu developed into the present deadly form as it spread rapidly through the tightly packed sheds of factory farms in South-east Asia - mutating to become lethal.

Last year, a report by a Canada-based international agricultural pressure group, Genetic Research Action International, concluded: "The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices. Its epicentre is the factory farms of China and South-east Asia - and its main vector is the poultry industry, which sends the products and wastes of its farms around the world."

In the past 30 years, battery chicken-farming has multiplied eightfold in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. And Qinghai Lake - the site of the first major deadly outbreak - is surrounded by many intensive poultry farms and a fish farm where chicken faeces may have been used as food.

The outbreak in eastern Turkey, reports pointed out, occurred only two weeks after a visit by a truck selling off old chickens from a factory farm.

Now that the disease has arrived in Britain, we may see a further magnification of costs. In addition to the public health burden, there could be a direct impact on the poultry industry. A year ago, a swan was found with H5N1 in Cellardyke, Fife, having died at sea and been washed ashore. Then, in May last year, more than 50,000 chickens were slaughtered in Norfolk when some were found to have the lesser H7N3 strain. The National Farmers' Union believes these two events cost £58m in sales of chicken and turkey meat and related products - because, in spite of public health assurances that there was no risk, many consumers decided to play safe.

The same advice is being given out now by governments, councils, vets, producers and retailers. "Bird flu is not a food safety hazard," the supermarket Sainsbury's said yesterday. "If there is any risk to poultry, we will remove it. We would advise against any inappropriate hysteria."

Quite when appropriate hysteria will set in is unclear. What is certain is that, if poultry sales drop by just 5 per cent, some 500,000 chickens a week will have to be disposed of.

Perhaps amusingly, Bernard Matthews' website is advertising - with yesterday as the closing date - for a new consumer relations assistant to help with "the monitoring of complaint levels, trend analysis, production of consumer complaint data and other general clerical duties". It's going to take more than one extra person in Consumer Relations to deal with this problem.

There will be plenty of people who will feel happy that Bernard Matthews will be getting his comeuppance. But whether it's him who deserves retribution - or a society determined to eat cheaply, unhealthily and with little concern at the long-term environmental consequences - is something we might all now need to think about.

His feathered friends: it's a turkey's life

* Eggs are taken from breeding flocks and put into incubators in a hatchery. It takes about 27 days for the chicks to appear. They are sorted by sex to prevent injury, as stags grow much larger than hens.

* The day-old chicks are loaded into covered trays and transported in temperature-controlled lorries to a rearing farm.

* The birds are housed in purpose-built sheds on a litter of straw and/or wood shavings. An average of 1,000 turkeys are kept in a single house. They are given a diet of grain by automated feeders. There is also a continual water supply.

* The birds will increase in weight from around 200g to 13kg. Lighting can be adjusted to give a day and night effect to encourage normal sleeping patterns, and the barns are kept at an ambient temperature. New litter is introduced on a regular basis. Human contact is kept to a minimum for bio-security reasons. The farmer will check on their health and welfare at least once a day.

* At 21 weeks, the birds are caught by teams of catchers and put into specially designed lidded trays in groups of eight to 10. The trays are loaded on to lorries and transported to a slaughterhouse.

On arrival, the crates are removed and put to one side for about half-an-hour to calm the birds and get them used to their surroundings. Each crate is put through a gassing machine that contains inert gases, such as carbon dioxide or argon.

* After about 30 seconds, the birds reappear unconscious. Their bodies are taken from the crate and hung from their legs on a chain belt. A slaughter man or machine then cuts the artery in their necks. On the chain, the carcasses pass into a de-feathering machine. Hot water and a series of rubber vibrating fingers remove the feathers. A machine partially removes the heads and draws out the birds' internal organs.

* Each bird is examined by a Government inspector for signs of disease. Once the head has been removed, the bird goes through the butchery process, which is normally carried out by hand. Whole birds have their feet and parts of their wings removed. Others are divided into portions. Each butcher does a particular cut. Further processing, such as mincing and bread-crumbing, is done in another room.

* After being packaged, the meat is transported to supermarkets for sale.

Source: The British Poultry Council