Bernard Matthews has died

[SiHart]

Bootiful Turkey tycoon, Bernard Matthews has died...#

Norfolk turkey tycoon Bernard Matthews has died at the age of 80, his company has confirmed.

He began his business more than 60 years ago - with 20 eggs and a second-hand incubator.

Mr Matthews, famous for his "bootiful" catchphrase, stepped down from the company's main board of directors in January on his 80th birthday.

Noel Bartram, group chief executive of Bernard Matthews Farms, said Mr Matthews died on Thursday afternoon.

The company had suffered some difficult years recently which had included job cuts and an outbreak of bird flu.

Mr Bartram said: "I have personally known Bernard Matthews for well over 30 years, and on behalf of myself and my fellow colleagues, I wish to express our great sorrow and extend our thoughts and sympathies to the family.

"Rarely has any business been as synonymous with the hard work and values of one man.

"It was Bernard Matthews who grew and developed this company through his entrepreneurial spirit, and clear focus."

Mr Matthews, the son of a mechanic, was born in Brooke, Norfolk, in 1930 and left school at 16.

He began his rise to prominence in 1950 when he bought 20 turkey eggs and an incubator at a market in Acle.

By 1952 he was producing 3,000 turkey eggs at his home and moved into poultry farming full-time.

Three years later he bought Great Witchingham Hall, near Norwich - a derelict mansion with 36 acres of land which remains the headquarters of the Bernard Matthews Farms.

Did you love his turkey drummers?

Si xx

[Si Hunt]

Hmmm. Maybe not the time and place to "dig the carving knife in". He was a self-made millionaire, so good for him. And it was great that he owned the company AND appeared in the adverts, winking and driving a delivery fan.

But, as Alan Partridge said in his new web show last week, "He was either a world class entrepeneaur or responsible for the biggest Turkey genocide in history". I may be a hypocrite as a meat eater, but there's always been something Nasty about Matthews brand of factory-line breaded turkey. His is the type of food that has been blasted in recent years as the anthesis of the kind of organic, healthy eating we are educating ourselves in today, and a generation has grown up, in my opinion, poorly nourished on a diet of cheap "turkey twizzler" oven meals. There's also been several suggestions down the years that if you ever saw a Bernard Matthews factory, it'd probably put you off eating meat for life. I don't think these birds lead anything near a "happy life" before facing the chop. To that end, he's something of a contradiction; technically no less guilty than any in the food industry, another view might see him as a monster, the Hitler of poultry, sanctioning cruelty to creatures and a bastardised, loveless diet to millions of kids via nurturating a generation of lazy parents who have fed their offspring his cheap tasteless frozen goods instead of proper food.

Er... but rest in peace.

Si.

[Si Hunt]

His Telegraph obituary:

When Matthews began his business in the 1950s, turkey was a luxury item, seen as an exclusively Christmas treat for the better-off. The average turkey, a huge beast, cost two weeks' average wages. By the 1970s, thanks to Matthews, turkey had become the cheapest meat product available – cheaper than cat food – with an all-year-round market.

Matthews became a household name in 1980, when he reluctantly agreed to front an advertising campaign to promote his products. Standing in a Norfolk jacket and plus fours in front of his Elizabethan manor house at Great Witchingham, Norfolk, he extolled the virtues of his turkeys in a broad Norfolk accent: "Bootiful, really bootiful".

Those three words increased sales a massive 17-fold, breaking all previous records for an advertising campaign and propelling Matthews into the ranks of the multimillionaires.

Matthews diversified into Turkey Roasts; Turkey Steaks in Crispy Crumbs; Golden Drummers; Turkey Burgers; Turkey Tikkas; Turkistrami; and, for children, Jetters ("unique fun aeroplane shape") and Dinosaurs ("They've seen the movie, now they can have them for tea"). There were more besides. By 2001 he was slaughtering 13 million birds a year and his business turnover was £423 million. He liked to predict that, in the 21st century, all meat would be turkey: "It will just be different flavours – beef, pork and lamb."

A powerfully built man who stood 6ft 4in tall, on television Matthews came across as a ruddy-cheeked, chubby, jovial Norfolk poulterer. But the bluff image was deceptive. In fact, Matthews was a rather solitary, reticent man who took himself and his turkeys extremely seriously. He was defensive with journalists and disliked personal publicity.

His direct, brusque style did not endear him to some of the more traditional members of Norfolk society and his intensive factory farming techniques made him the bête noire of environmentalists, animal rights campaigners and foodies.

Yet there were many people in Norfolk who admired him, not least for the jobs he had brought to the county and his generosity to local causes – and even his rivals had to admit that he was no fool. When supermarkets and rival manufacturers tried to duplicate his success with spin-off products in the early 1980s, they found both the products and the processes involved protected by impenetrable patents, an unusual thing in the food industry at that time.

Matthews was always happiest when running his business and talking turkey. As chairman of his company, he would regularly spend two hours in the food laboratories, testing out new lines. Sometimes he would taste 30 products in one session: "You really have to like turkey to do this job," he declared.

Bernard Trevor Matthews was born near Norwich on January 24 1930, the youngest of four children of a motor mechanic. A bright child, he won a scholarship to Norwich Grammar School, but his early life was not easy. His father was often out of work and his mother worked as a cleaner to supplement the pittance that her husband did manage to earn. When Bernard was 11, he and his sister had to move in with an aunt after their parents suddenly disappeared. They eventually returned, but divorced when Bernard was 16.

After leaving school, and two years national service as an RAF clerk, Matthews found work as a livestock auctioneer's clerk at 35 shillings a week. It was barely enough to live on, and he began casting around for a moneymaking hobby to supplement his income.

In 1950 he bid at auction for 20 turkey eggs and a paraffin oil incubator. They were knocked down to him for £2.50. Twelve of the eggs hatched but, as he had not calculated for feeding the birds, the venture was not as lucrative as he had hoped, and he sold the chicks to a neighbouring farmer. After packing in his job at the auction house to become an insurance clerk, he had more money to spare and bought more turkeys. This time the wind blew their shelter away and they all escaped.

Refusing to give in, he tried again – on a much grander scale. In 1955, backed by a £2,500 loan, he bought Great Witchingham Hall, a dilapidated 80-roomed Elizabethan manor outside Norwich which had once been the home of John Norris, man of letters. Matthews reckoned that, at 5p a square foot, it was considerably cheaper than the 30p a square foot he would have to invest to build his own turkey sheds.

Apart from the bedroom in which he and his wife Joyce lived, he turned the house over to turkeys, hatching them in the living room, rearing them in the bedrooms and slaughtering them in the kitchens.

The new squire of Great Witchingham soon established himself as the leading player in the industry, which until then had been a small if profitable sideline for only a few farmers. After filling his house, Matthews moved out into the surrounding acres and, in 1958, bought the first of six redundant airfields. It was a shrewd move. Aerodromes were secure and isolated, and their concrete runways ideally suited for turkey houses. He built the first big turkey slaughterhouse and went into large-scale production.

Matthews quickly realised that the normal-sized turkey was too large for most modern families – even at Christmas – so he began breeding smaller birds at weights of between five and seven pounds. That led to higher turnover and more efficient methods of producing them in quantity, which helped keep prices down.

Matthews's frozen turkeys took the oven-ready market by storm. Eventually his empire would run to 500 vast turkey houses, most of them in Norfolk, which, if laid end to end, would stretch for 40 miles. In 1964 he presented a 55lb turkey to President Khrushchev during a Moscow trade fair. Soon afterwards he began developing food production plants for the governments of communist countries such as Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland and Bulgaria.

But his domestic market remained stubbornly seasonal, and by the mid-1970s was showing signs of stagnation. So he set about making turkey a year-round, non-luxury item by deboning it, chopping it up and repackaging it in smaller portions. In 1975 he developed a revolutionary new "co-extrusion" technique in which meat is taken off the bone and pumped into a long casing like a sausage. This enabled him to move into mass production of spin-off products, but he did not build up a really big market for his turkey rolls and turkey roasts until the 1980 advertising campaign.

The effect of the campaign was to turn Matthews plc (the company went public in 1971) from an agricultural business into an advanced food processor, and Matthews patented the extrusion technology, not just for turkeys, but for all meat. He diversified into red meat, chicken, fish and pork products, moved into North America, New Zealand and Europe, and sought royalties through international deals for his technology.

He even launched a range of vegetarian products, though this did not prove successful. By the 1990s, nine tenths of his earnings came from spin-off products. The festive season, by comparison, was something of a sideshow.

Matthews's no-frills factory farming techniques attracted the opprobrium of environmentalists and animal rights and health campaigners. He was twice prosecuted for polluting Norfolk rivers with effluent and once fined for failing to admit on a label that some of his products contained "mechanically recovered meat" (MRM). Though sensitive to criticism, he was robust in defending himself. "Turkeys have a very low IQ," he said, rejecting criticism of the conditions in his turkey houses. "All they need is food and warmth. They don't need to be taken to a cinema twice a week."

In 2005 the chef Jamie Oliver, as head of a campaign to make school meals more healthy, singled out Matthews's Turkey Twizzlers for particular criticism, having an adverse effect on the company's operating profits. It later responded by reducing the salt and saturated fat contents in their products, and removing artificial colours and flavours.

In February 2007 the H5N1 strain of bird flu was identified at a Matthews plant at Holton in Suffolk, leading to the slaughter of some 160,000 birds and a decline in sales.

Matthews did not flaunt his wealth. His two big concessions to multimillionaire status were a Rolls-Royce and a 158ft yacht, the Bellissima, which he eventually sold to "an Arab who wanted it more than I did". At Great Witchingham Manor, which he restored and furnished with antiques, he lived a careful, modest life and preferred spending his evenings at home to going out and socialising.

One of the very few people who appeared not to have heard of the brand name Bernard Matthews was the Queen, who asked him, when she appointed him CBE in 1992, which branch of the poultry business he was in. When he told her, she observed that "a lot of turkeys come from Norfolk". He supported a number of charities, and in 2007 he was appointed CVO for services to the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme.

Bernard Matthews, who stepped down as group chairman in January this year, on his 80th birthday, was reticent about his private life. He and his wife, Joyce, whom he married in 1953, had three adopted children: two daughters and a son. He also had a son by a Dutch former girlfriend.

[Captain Tancredi]

I think he's probably one of the nearest things we've had in this country to an American-style self-made millionaire businessman who puts his name on his product, and deserves some respect for that.

But the whole idea of factory farming and stripping every last crumb of meat off a carcass isn't good, even if one of his pre-packaged joints was often a Sunday dinner when I was younger.

[WhiteCrowNZ]

Shame - he was a character.

Do Police suspect foul-play?

[Zbigniev Hamson]

But the whole idea of factory farming and stripping every last crumb of meat off a carcass isn't good, even if one of his pre-packaged joints was often a Sunday dinner when I was younger.

I don't see what's wrong with that bit at least. Waste not want not.

[Si Hunt]

What's wrong with it is that is that it means that you reach the concept of processed meat that you can't tell where it's come from. So whose to say if you buy a burger containing this "mechnically recovered meat" it's going to all be Turkey? Maybe it's been 'padded out' with cheaper meat, maybe some of it isn't even meat? You just can't tell.

Si.

[Jamie McCrimmon]

What's wrong with it is that is that it means that you reach the concept of processed meat that you can't tell where it's come from. So whose to say if you buy a burger containing this "mechnically recovered meat" it's going to all be Turkey? Maybe it's been 'padded out' with cheaper meat, maybe some of it isn't even meat? You just can't tell.

Si.

Quite. You don't know which part of whatever animal it is. It could be eyes, brains, boiled feet. Tasty.

Shame - he was a character.

Do Police suspect foul-play?

LOL

[Captain Tancredi]

The point I should have made is that by default the mechanically recovered meat then tends to end up in the cheapest products which are then eaten by families struggling to balance their budget and particularly the shaped portions aimed at children. Breast fillets and drumsticks are actually quite a small proportion of the body of a chicken or a turkey, but then in this country we have quite particular tastes as to what we will and won't touch- last night I was talking to a French woman who was disappointed by how difficult it is to get veal or rabbit here.

[Jamie McCrimmon]

If he's cremated, I wonder if they'll coat him in breadcrumbs first.

[Captain Tancredi]

Or, indeed, whether they'll shove several fistfuls of Paxo up him.

[SiHart]

Bootiful!

Si xx

[WhiteCrowNZ]

I saw on Twitter that James Blunt is scheduled to sing at his funeral ...