It was not hard to remember the jingle, it accompanied the advertisement on Westward and HTV television in the 1970s. A hornpipe tune to an advertisement for butter might have seemed odd, what had seafaring tunes to do with dairy products? The answer was that Anchor butter came from New Zealand.

An internet search revealed that the jingle ran to two stanzas. It may have been poetry worthy of William McGonagall, but it achieved its purpose of lodging Anchor butter firmly in the mind of even a schoolboy who had no responsibility for shopping.

There’s an anchor sign on Britain’s favourite butter,
It’s the anchor sign that tells you it’s the best.
If you want your bread well buttered, there’s no other name you’ll utter
’Cos Britain’s favourite butter has the Anchor sign

Everybody loves it ’cos it tastes so nice,
Housewives like it for the lovely price.
If you want your bread well buttered, there’s no other name you’ll utter
’Cos Britain’s favourite butter has the Anchor sign!

Anchor seemed always a distinctive brand, a product with an individual identity. There was no clue from the television advertisements that it was produced by the Fonterra Farmers’ Co-operative, a body that now controls 30% of the worldwide dairy export business.

It seemed odd picking up Anchor butter and seeing a Union Jack and reading details on the packet that it was produced in Wiltshire. What had happened to the New Zealand link and my imaginings of Kiwi farmers producing butter they would send halfway around the world so that we could spread it thickly on slices of fresh farmhouse bread?

Anchor is now produced by Arla, using cream from British farmers, yet it might have seemed more British when Fonterra were making it. Arla is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Swedish-Danish company owned by 10,000 farmers in Sweden and Denmark.

Dairy products, it seems, are a big multinational industry that is far removed from the ways of traditional farming. Producing milk for butter is the work of vast farms with computerised robot-controlled milking parlours. The technology has the capacity to monitor the productivity and health of every cow in herds that can number thousands. Falling milk yields and poor health will quickly lead to a cow being sent to the slaughterhouse.

Anchor butter may have retained its taste, but the image of the small farmer with his herd of cows is now as redundant as playing a hornpipe in a butter advertisement.