As the turkey flies, it is about 800 miles in a refrigerated lorry from the town of Sarvar in western Hungary to the “bootiful” processing plants of Bernard Matthews in Holton, Suffolk. It is a long journey and an unexpected one, not only for the turkeys.

To the public Bernard Matthews (BM) has long portrayed itself as a quintessentially British company whose birds are reared amid the rural charms of eastern England. It is a key facet of the BM brand and one the group clearly had every intention of maintaining despite the facts when bird flu was first detected at its UK facilities eight days ago.

“All our birds are British,” said a spokesman for the company. “They are home grown. The fact that we have a Hungarian operation is immaterial.”

In case that was not enough, the firm later added: “All the turkeys had British mums and dads and the eggs are grown by us and the chicks are put in the sheds.”

It is one thing for the public to have been fooled but quite another for the hapless Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). It knew of the imports and it knew that Hungary had had a outbreak of bird flu in January, but for the first week of the crisis it continued to tell anyone who would listen that the most likely source was migrating wild birds.

In a fiasco that brought back memories of BSE and foot and mouth, farmers across Britain were put on alert to watch out for infected wild birds, while BM was allowed to carry on blithely importing turkey parts from Hungary at a rate of 40 tons a week. The authorities now fear the products may have ended up on supermarket shelves across the country.

Leading avian experts were fuming. They pointed out that birds which migrate from Hungary to Britain mostly arrive before Christmas, not in preparation for spring. And a mild winter across Europe had made the chances of birds migrating to British shores even slimmer.

One leading ornithologist and government adviser (who asked not to be named) said: “I find it quite incredible. Everybody who knows anything about birds would be shocked if this was the source. They would be scratching their heads and going ‘man, this is bizarre’.”

Not the government. When David Miliband, secretary of state for the environment, rose to brief MPs on the bird flu outbreak last Monday, he stated confidently that there was no connection with Hungary, despite some experts already raising the possibility of a link.

“The chicks [at the Suffolk farm] all came from within this country, so there is no Hungarian connection of that sort,” he said. “The factory involved in the Hungarian outbreak was not a Bernard Matthews factory.” The truth, it turns out, could not be more different. Hundreds of tons of the meat sold in Britain by BM comes from Hungary and has long done so. Moreover, the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus identified in Suffolk is identical to the strain that forced the cull of thousands of birds in Hungary only last month, experts have confirmed.

“It beggars belief that the government could have been so casual about the virus being brought in on imported meat,” said Peter Ainsworth, the shadow environment secretary, yesterday. “The government appears guilty of extraordinary complacency.” INSIDE the huge sheds that form the BM complex in Suffolk, a turkey’s lot is not a happy one. An undercover reporter from The Sunday Times spent 12 days working at BM in 1998 and saw harsh treatment of some birds, which were housed in sheds that held up to 17,000 at a time.

The paper reported at the time workers talking about playing cruel games with the birds including “bagpiping”, in which a bird was held under the arm and squeezed sharply, squirting excrement over other workers.

Last year animal rights activists caught workers playing similar games on film. A video on YouTube shows workers apparently playing “baseball” with the turkeys. One worker tosses bird after bird in the air while another bats them savagely in mid-air with a stick.

The company said these were isolated incidents and that any workers found committing abuse would be instantly sacked.

Being an employee in the turkey manufacturing process is no picnic either. Many manual workers are recruited from Portugal and work on lines where they are forbidden to talk and wear different coloured hats to denote their status. Yellow hats, the basic workers, earn about £200 a week.

In chilled conditions the birds have to be bled, gutted, deboned and packed. It is cold work and physically demanding.

“It’s slavery. The work was disgusting,” said one former worker last week who had worked on a line removing offal. “You’d cut into the bird and sometimes you’d have blood [spurt] on your face.”

However, for many employees it is better paid than the jobs available in Portugal.

“The bird flu doesn’t scare me,” said Vanessa Sofia, 28, who came from Portugal to work at BM. “What I worry about is people not buying Bernard Matthews and losing my job. I like my work.”

She has reason to worry. Bird flu and the bungled handling of it have put the company under severe pressure.

Sales of turkey products at supermarkets are down by about 10% and the Food Standards Agency is investigating whether meat contaminated with bird flu has entered the food chain. It is also reported to be considering a recall of turkey products from stores.

Although infected meat that is properly cooked poses no risk to human health, raw meat does. The authorities are also worried that infected meat scraps that are thrown away could transmit the virus to domestic pets or wild animals.

It is not surprising the public is suspicious, say critics, because the government, the company and the farming lobby have been less than open about the potential source of the virus. MUCH of BM’s imported meat comes from the Hungarian town of Sarvar, a modest place that retains a smart hall in a central square, an old castle and a fine church. Elderly Austrians like to pop over the border to stay at the spa and “take the waters”.

A short walk soon takes visitors into a world where decades of neglect under former Soviet dominion are evident. Paint peels off walls, roofs sag and potholes scatter the roads.

At the edge of town is the Saga Foods meat processing plant — a huge grey-green corrugated iron structure that was once the state-owned poultry processing company. Bought in 1993 by BM, it has undergone refurbishment but remains looking grimly industrial.

The plant is capable of churning out 36,000 virsli ever hour. Virsli are a cheap sausage, usually made out of poultry meat, that is popular in Hungary. Its distinctive smell pervades the nearby streets where tatty trucks used for transporting live poultry last week stood parked.

Saga also sends truckloads of semi-processed turkey meat to BM in Britain. This meat is then packaged in East Anglia and sold in British supermarkets as BM products.

Bart Dalla Mura, the commercial director of BM, was keen to play down any problem with the Saga operation last week. He emphasised that the plant was 160 miles away from the bird flu outbreak that had happened in Hungary and therefore could not be the source of the infection.

Once again it was not the whole truth. Investigations reveal that the plant in Sarvar has various sources of poultry and meat and sometimes sends birds for processing at other facilities. One is a company called Gallfood, which operates a slaughterhouse at Kecskemet in eastern Hungary. This is just 30 miles from the area where H5N1 was found.

Late last week BM admitted to The Sunday Times that Gallfood was the source of some 20 tons of turkey meat which had been sent to its Suffolk plant just before the outbreak of H5N1.

According to Miklos Suth, the chief vet of Hungary, the Kecskemet plant dispatched 290 tons of turkey breast to Britain in the past year. It also sent 1,000 tons of turkey products for processing at BM’s Saga plant in Sarvar.

“It seems that Bernard Matthews has been wanting to slaughter a lot of turkeys — more than the company has capacity for at its own slaughterhouse,” said Suth.

“Bernard Matthews’ plant is in Sarvar but it was using the Gallfood slaughterhouse in Kecskemet.”

The H5N1 virus has now been found at four of the giant sheds at the BM’s British plan in Holton — making it even more unlikely that the source was a wild bird that just happened to get into one of the sheds, as the company and government had initially suggested.

Yet even as BM began gassing 160,000 exposed birds last week, it was still importing poultry from Hungary — with Defra’s approval. The meat was turned into steaks; the company says it does not yet know whether they were delivered to shops.

Consumer confidence, not surprisingly, has once again been shaken.

Shopping at a Tesco in west London, Patricia Nunez, a 27-year-old administrator, said: “I usually have no worries about buying meat. But I’m not buying turkey at the moment. I’m not sure the government has done or said enough.”

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