LONDON -- Bernard Matthews, who parlayed an investment in 20 eggs into a business that became Britain's biggest turkey processor - once raising the birds in the rooms of a large country home - has died at age 80.
Matthews died Thursday at his home, the company said Friday. The cause of death was not announced.
"Bootiful" - Matthews' Norfolk-inflected pronunciation of "beautiful" - became one of Britain's best-known advertising slogans in a series of television ads in the 1980s.
In recent years, however, the company was targeted by animal rights groups for its intensive farming, and sales were hit in 2007 when one farm reported Britain's first outbreak of bird flu.
One of the company's products, Turkey Twizzlers, was singled out five years ago by TV chef Jamie Oliver as an example of excessively fatty food in school meals, and the product disappeared from many lunch menus.
Matthews, who stepped down as chairman of the company in January, started the business in 1950 with 20 eggs and a secondhand incubator. A dozen eggs hatched, Matthews sold the chicks at a profit and he was on his way.
Three years later he bought a derelict country house, Great Witchingham Hall, where he and his wife, Joyce, raised turkeys in all but one of the 36 rooms. It is still the company headquarters.
Matthews became something of an evangelist for turkeys, and presented one of his dressed birds to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a Moscow trade fair in 1964.
A promised contract never materialized, Matthews said in an interview with The Independent newspaper in 2004, but "I used to have Russian delegations coming here nearly every year, and they'd sit around this table asking question after question, and writing like hell in their notebooks - and they never paid me for it or anything."
The company expanded internationally, operating Bernard Matthews Oldenbrug GmbH in Germany and Saga Foods in Hungary. The company sold its New Zealand operation in 2007.
Last year, the company reported an operating profit excluding exceptional items of 2.5 million pounds ($3.9 million) up from 900,000 pounds in 2008, on revenue of 330 million pounds.
Matthews is survived by his wife, four children and six grandchildren.
Friday, 26 November 2010
UK turkey magnate Bernard Matthews dies at 80
Bernard Matthews remembered | Life and style | The Guardian
Bernard Matthews on the stairs of Great Witchingham Hall with a turkey. When he first bought the dilapidated mansion as a company HQ he and his wife lived in one room and the turkeys had the other 79.
Bernard Matthews started his turkey empire, so the story goes, with 20 eggs and a paraffin-oil incubator, and from those first hatchlings grew a business which now employs over 2,000 people.
Born in 1930 in Brooke, Norfolk, Matthews left school at 16 and, following national service in the Royal Air Force, purchased his golden eggs in 1950. The 12 eggs that hatched were sold for a £6.50 profit, a 2007 profile of the turkey tycoon revealed, and set the wheels in motion for a multi-million pound business.
Five years after those poults entered the world, Matthews was able to buy a Tudor mansion befitting a turkey magnate, the sprawling Great Witchingham Hall in his beloved Norfolk, which still serves as the company headquarters.
According to the Bernard Matthews' company website Matthews and his wife, Joyce, lived frugally in one room, while the other 79 rooms were set aside for just one purpose – raising turkeys.
By the 1980s, it was time for Matthews to begin advertising his poultry on television, with his "Bootiful" catchphrase swiftly entering the public consciousness.
As this video for Bernard Matthews' "New crispy crumb turkey steaks shows," Matthews, more often than not clad head to toe in tweed, wasn't afraid to involve his staff in advertising.
Matthews' legacy looms large across social networking websites today, with "Bernard Matthews" the most discussed terms worldwide on Twitter, and the Norfolk man being mentioned around 10 times per minute on Facebook.
The adverts were so popular that the inevitable spoof followed, with this Spitting Image sketch from 1986 turning the tables on the mogul – a turkey appearing on screen to report that Matthews "threw himself in the mincer": the result being the production of "Bernard burgers: containing 100% minced Matthews", and "Bernie's balls: only 42p a pair".
"In honour of Turkey magnate Bernard Matthews, there will now follow a two-minute mispronunciation of the word 'beautiful'," @martini_weenie asserted on Twitter, while @Vish_Liverpool lamented: "Bernard Matthews died on Thanksgiving ... sad news but too ... many ... jokes ... "
There were some dissenting voices as the gags came thick and fast, however pleas like @JaeKay's: "May I ask for a stop to the Bernard Matthews jokes before they start in earnest?" came in vain.
However while the bulk of the memories today were good-natured, others will remember the scandals that beset Matthews' company – in 2006 two employees were ordered to serve 200 hours of community service after being filmed playing baseball with turkeys at a plant in Haveringland, Norfolk.
Three years ago birds at one of Matthews' plants were found to be infected with bird flu, and a later investigation found a string of flaws that could have led to the outbreak, including uncovered bins and holes where mice and rats could enter the turkey sheds.
But this afternoon Matthews appeared to be largely fondly remembered, with the RIP acronyms outweighing the RSPCAs.
Paul Clarkson perhaps best summed up the feelings of most, as well as name-dropping one of Matthews' most iconic turkey products, with his Facebook post:
"RIP Bernard Matthews, you will always be remembered for your turkey drummers. "Bootiful, just bootiful."
Good bye Mr Matthews. I worked for you once. Came in on one of your buses. worked on the loading bay at Gt Witchingham. Thanks for the work.
Earthquake Warning - Random Hacks of Kindness
From Random Hacks of Kindness
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Contents
[hide][edit] Earthquake Warning
[edit] Owner
Proposed by: google.org
Contact (name, email, phone, skype): Steve Hakusa <shakusa@google.com>, Pablo Mayrgundter <pmy@google.com>
Best way and times to contact during RHoK 2.0 Dec 4/5 2010: email
[edit] Summary
[edit] Example
The epicenter for the Haitian Earthquake was 25km from Port-au-Prince and 13km deep, meaning 28km propagation distance; this equates to 5.6 seconds away from the less-damaging primary waves, and 9.3 seconds away from the very damaging secondary waves. Also, large earthquakes may take place over many tens of seconds, so the time to react is significant.
If detection and notification could be done before this time, people in the city could have had a chance to brace for impact, take cover or run outside. Also, notification that the shaking is an earthquake, instead of say a big truck going by, may prime a person to be ready to react.
[edit] Use Case/User Story/Scenario
"Ana is at home before the earthquake strikes. Her phone (or computer, or TV) issues a loud alert warning of an impending earthquake, along with a count-down in seconds; Ann grabs her child and takes cover under the kitchen table. Part of the roof falls in but the table protects them and they are able to crawl out of the rubble."
[edit] Description and Constraints
False positives may lead people to ignore later true positives. Thought should be given of how to clarify alerting behavior to users, before, during and after an alert is issued.
Solution should be likely to be near to people, e.g. phone, radio or TV.
[edit] Phone Client
Modern smart-phones typically have accelerometers and high-accuracy GPS and timers and are likely to be near their user, often also at night; however mobile phones are mobile! They also have low power resources. A phone client may need to operate only when otherwise idle, not moving and plugged in.
A phone is also a good target for user alerts, since it will likely be with them. Thought should be given to how alerts can be distributed to phone users, including to users who do not operate sensors.
[edit] Similar projects and Resources
- The QuakeCatcher network: http://qcn.stanford.edu/
- Developing Plugins for CAP Disaster Alerts
- Browser Alerts
[edit] What next and Sustainability
[edit] Current State and Solutions
QCN is a solution using a distributed p2p sensing network. The project is still developing and could use a mobile client.
BOINC, the platform on which QCN is built, has an Android client port:
http://boincoid.sourceforge.net/Retrieved from "http://wiki.rhok.org/Earthquake_Warning"
Browser Alerts - Random Hacks of Kindness
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Contents
[hide][edit] Browser Alerts Problem Definition
[edit] Description
Show emergency alerts (hurricane, tsunami, tornado, warnings, etc) in browsers. Constrain to IP geolocations in warning area. Start with a desktop plugin, migrate to a native browser feature, meld with CAP standard, deploy as a mobile application. Enable forwarding of message to friends/contacts.
[edit] Considerations
- Compatible with all major browsers
- Very robust hackproofing/verification mechanism(s)
- Who has access to inputs? How is this different in different countries/areas?
- Can this be made less text-dependent to make it more universally understandable without translations?
[edit] Use Cases
1. A string of tornadoes is bearing down on the US Midwest.
2. A tsunami is expected to hit the eastern coastline of New Zealand.[edit] Requirements
- Ability for users to opt-in/opt-out?
- Data display considerations (CAP-based?): issuing agency, area of impact, severity of impact, estimated time of impact, etc.
- Turn off alert once acknowledged/read or leave on and stream updates?
- Consider color (red?) to communicate urgency
- How to communicate sense of urgency while reducing/mitigating false alarms as a result of IP geolocation imprecision?
- Provide ability to pass the information on through several outlets: email friend, sms friend, post to FB, etc.
[edit] Comments
[edit] --Gavintreadgold 03:23, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- Repository for Wordpress CAP extension in http://bitbucket.org/dxc/alertcl (Mercurial)
- Repository for Firefox CAP Plugin in http://bitbucket.org/dxc/capalerts (Mercurial)
- Here is a blog post from 2009 that I wrote about this idea - Firefox Browser CAP Alerting Plugin
- We had a successful prototype developed by one of our 2009 Google Summer of Code projects for the Sahana Software Foundation - see Sahana CAP Firefox Plugin
- As part of this project we also developed a CAP aggregator within Sahana - Sahana CAP Aggregator
- Please consider extending this work that has already been undertaken ;)
- CAP is the Emergency Data eXchange Language (EDXL) Common Alerting Protocol extension managed by the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee.
- Sahana Agasti already has an Alerting and Messaging module that is capable of producing CAP alerts as well.
- This should probably be merged with the Developing Plugins for CAP Disaster Alerts idea.
[edit] RSS Feeds
Links where the RSS were finded:
- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/feeds.html
- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/
- http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/subscribe.php
- Global Tsunami data:
- http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/rss/tsunamirss.xml WC/ATWC - most recent message
- http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/feeds/ptwc_rss_caribe.xml PTWC - Caribbean Sea
- http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/feeds/ptwc_rss_indian.xml PTWC - Indian Ocean
- http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/feeds/ptwc_rss_hawaii.xml PTWC - Hawai`i
- http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/feeds/ptwc_rss_pacific.xml PTWC - Pacific Ocean
- Global Earthquake:
- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/1day-M2.5.xml Past 1 day, Major 2,5º
- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/catalogs/eqs1day-M2.5.xml Past 1 day, Major 2,5º
- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/7day-M2.5.xml Past 7 days, Major 2,5º
- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/7day-M5.xml Past 7 days, Major 5º
- Volcanes:
- http://volcano.wr.usgs.gov/rss/vhpcaprss.xml|U.S. Volcanoes
- Hurricanes, Tornados:
Retrieved from "http://wiki.rhok.org/Browser_Alerts"
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