WHEN Jamie Oliver declared war on Bernard Matthews' Turkey Twizzlers, he said he'd like to "send a bomb round their factory and shove it right up the jacksie of the MD". The belligerent chef may well feel some schadenfreude now the 76-year-old's £400m empire looks to be on the verge of self-destructing as a result of the bird flu that has swept through one of his farms.
There is a certain symmetry that Matthews, whose company benefited from the outbreak of BSE in the 1990s, should now fall victim to the avian epidemic of the noughties. Yet it is hard not to feel sympathetic when reports suggest the man once famous a
s the ruddy-faced Norfolk farmer with the "bootiful" turkeys has been reduced to a shadow of his former self.
Like Oliver, Bernard Matthews is something of an evangelist. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was in the vanguard of effort-free cooking, teaching the nation that turkeys were not just for Christmas, and coming up with low-cost hassle-free cooking options for hard-pressed working mothers. Who could forget such culinary delights as mini Kievs, turkey drummers and the Golden Norfolk self-basting turkey joint?
Granted, the company was dogged by rumours of poor conditions in its factories. But for years Matthews was able to put up a robust defence of his working practices, his tweed jacket and yokel accent providing evidence of his bucolic sincerity.
The root of his success was that he understood the cult of personality long before Tom Farmer, Richard Branson or Ena Baxter learned to exploit it to their advantage. Just a year after US entrepreneur Victor Kiam of Remington first uttered the words: "I liked the shaver so much I bought the company", Bernard Matthews made himself synonymous with his products by starring in an advertising campaign with the catchline: "It's bootiful, really bootiful." He cut a comical figure, but the formula made him rich, securing him a house in St Tropez, a plane and a yacht called Bellissima ("really bootiful" in Italian).
The story of Matthews' rise from lowly-paid auctioneer's apprentice to multi-millionaire is almost as quirky as the man himself. Born the son of a mechanic in the village of Brooke in 1930, Matthews won a scholarship at the City of Norwich School, but dropped out, without sitting his exams, at the age of 16.
Desperate to bolster his meagre wage packet, he bought 20 turkey eggs from a local market. "I bought them for a shilling each," he explained. "On the same day, in another part of the market, there was a small paraffin-oil incubator which I bought for £1.10s." Matthews sold the resulting turkeys for more than three times his investment, developing a taste for profit-making in the process.
When juggling two roles became too much for him, he gave up his day job to devote himself full-time to turkey breeding, but his fledgling business venture suffered at least one false start before taking flight. The weekend after he stopped work, gales swept across the county whisking up his coops and his turkeys like Dorothy's house in The Wizard Of Oz. Unfazed, Matthews spent the next day following a trail of feathers and recovering 50 of the escaped birds.
This problem resolved, the business grew rapidly, and, at the age of 25, he and his wife Joyce, with whom he has three children, bought Great Witchingham Hall - a dilapidated Tudor pile near Norwich which is still the company headquarters - for £3,000. The oft-told tale that he and Joyce lived in two rooms while the turkeys had the run of the other 34 is probably apocryphal, but it has passed into Norfolk folklore nonetheless.
Within five years, Matthews had secured a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest turkey producer in Europe. Recognising a niche in the market for easy-cook poultry products he experimented with recipes in his test kitchen, coming up with turkey ham and turkey dinosaurs, as well as the infamous Twizzlers.
Changing tastes did little to dent his reign and, by 2004, Bernard Matthews was Britain's ninth-biggest food brand (one place behind McVitie's), employing 6,000 workers. Its chairman's insistence that intensive indoor rearing was the only viable option because turkeys reared outdoors are vulnerable to infection made him the bête noir of animal rights campaigners. A video aired by GMTV showed birds lying injured in over-crowded, darkened sheds.
But if Matthews was scorned by the likes of Compassion in World Farming, he was honoured by the establishment. His contribution to the Prince's Trust was last year formally acknowledged when he was appointed to the Royal Victorian Order - a title he added to his existing CBE.
It was only really in 2005, when Oliver put Turkey Twizzlers at the heart of his campaign to make school dinners healthier, that Matthews' luck began to turn. Sales of the line fell overnight as local authorities and parents took it off their menus, and production ceased soon afterwards.
Then, last year, a cruelty scandal added momentum to his downward slide. Two turkey catchers at his plant in Haveringland, Norfolk, were secretly filmed playing baseball with live turkeys. An RSPCA inspector who viewed the tape described the abuse as hideous, the worst he had seen in 25 years.
Matthews' reaction was typically aggressive. He took out a full-page advertisement in a newspaper, pointing out the men were contractors and insisting his workers did not abuse turkeys. "Our employees are conscientious people who work in co-operation with our retail customers, local and national government authorities and various welfare organisations, including the RSPCA," it said. But with eco-friendly food production now firmly on the political agenda, the trusty farmer routine was no longer enough to buoy up consumer confidence.
Accounts which showed operating profits had dropped from £40.4m to £26.7m were filed in December, the same month Matthews changed tack, and announced he was moving into the free-range and organic market, with the takeover of the organic producer Cherryridge Poultry.
The move demonstrated Matthews' enduring business nous, but it came too late, because the New Year brought a PR disaster that would flummox even Max Clifford. As it emerged a Bernard Matthews farm at Holton in Suffolk (one of 57) was at the centre of the country's first mass outbreak of H5N1 bird flu, any thoughts of rebranding became academic.
With 2,600 turkeys infected, a further 159,000 culled and a two-mile exclusion zone imposed around the premises, Matthews could only watch as his dreams of recovering his former stature disappeared in a pall of smoke.
Approached by reporters outside his home on Friday, he appeared broken, declaring: "I'm sorry, but I have had absolutely enough of all this."
Of course, the man who more than half a century ago braved driving winds to rescue his missing turkeys may yet weather this storm. But the long-term forecast is anything but "bootiful".
CV
1930 Born the son of a mechanic and a housekeeper in the village of Brooke in Norfolk.
1950 Started his turkey-breeding company.
1960 Entered the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest turkey farmer in Europe.
2005 Fell foul of Jamie Oliver's healthy eating campaign.
2006 Was forced to defend workers after two contractors played baseball with a live turkey.
