I held down the shift key before double clicking the iTunes icon, thereby giving me a dialogue box asking where my library was with the option of creating a new one. So I did that and got an empty library. I signed into iTunes Match and my files appeared with the cloud icon. I selected all and deleted them to remove them from iTunes Match. I went off and cooked the dinner for an hour to give it time in case it needed it. Then came back, closed iTunes, held down shift and opened it again, this time browsing to my old library. Then I signed in to iTunes Match and it's been scanning my library for a good few hours. I'm going to leave it overnight and see where we are. I know the files did disappear from iCloud because I checked on my iPhone and iTunes library on my MacBook Pro and they were both empty.
Fingers cross I've fixed it without too much manual labour!