Once the world’s longest-serving aircraft carrier, Britain’s HMS Hermes has come to an ignoble end. She’s lying on an Indian beach being broken up for scrap, her steel destined for motorbike production.

Though she was considered the Royal Navy’s flagship during the Falklands war in the early 80s, that role was a brief starburst in a career beset by problems. It didn’t even start well.

Construction began in 1944 but WWII ended before she was completed, so the work ground to a halt. The forlorn hull sat in the dockyard in Barrow-in-Furness until 1953, when it was launched unceremoniously to make way for other shipbuilding projects. The unfortunate carrier carried a cruel nickname – HMS Elephant.

Though the build was finally completed in 1957 she only began active service two years later. In a 1966 review the Royal Navy decided she was surplus to its requirements and tried to sell her to Australia. But the Aussies concluded she would be too expensive.

She was refitted twice in the 1960s and 70s before the Navy once again decided (in 1981) that she was surplus to requirements. But just as the scrapyard plans were being finalised Argentina invaded the Falklands and Maggie Thatcher quickly dispatched her to the South Atlantic. She returned to a hero’s welcome.

That glory was short-lived and in 1986 she was sold to the Indian navy and renamed INS Viraat, serving that country for three decades before being decommissioned in 2017. After lying abandoned in Mumbai for three years, she was sold for £5.1million to the Shree Ram Group – it owns Asia’s largest ship scrapyard in Alang.

Poor old Hermes will live on as thousands of motorbikes.