NOT for the first time, the Ark Royal has been sold for razor blades.

The aircraft carrier flagship of the British Fleet has been sold rather ignobly for £3 million this month and will be broken up for scrap and re-used as, among other things, tin cans and razor blades.

This is the same fate that befell the previous Ark Royal that was decommissioned in 1979 and upon which my chum Kev “the Sparky” Andrews served.

He was on board when a BBC documentary film crew started preliminary testing and shooting for the series Sailor that followed the lives of the officers and men on board.

“Everywhere you turned, you'd bump into a bloke with a camera,” says Kev. “So we all got into the habit of immediately finding work to do so we would be filmed. Unfortunately, I was transferred to another ship the week before they started filming properly.”

But he has fond memories of his time aboard, the friends he made and shore leave in different parts of the world.

“It was on the Ark Royal that I was sent to Royal Naval Detention Quarters for striking a superior officer,” he says. “Mind you, he deserved it.”

Well, you know what sailors are.

The Ark Royal has other local connections, apart from Kev and, no doubt, lots of other ex matelots. The two gear boxes for port and starboard were built by David Browns of Lockwood. “And the centrifuges that operated the spin dryers for the laundry came from Broadbents,” said Kev.

There have actually been five Ark Royals. The first was the flagship of the British fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. The second was a merchant vessel that was converted into an aircraft carrier in 1914, the third was launched in 1937 and was sunk by U-Boat in 1941.

The most well known was probably the one on which Kev sailed simply because of the popularity of the documentary that was compelling viewing. It also gave Rod Stewart a hit with the song Sailing, which had actually been written and recorded earlier by Scottish duo the Sutherland Brothers, without any great success.

There had been attempts to save the last Ark Royal, as a Hong Kong casino or a helipad on the Thames, but a Ministry of Defence spokesman said: “She wasn't in the condition to be kept.”

Lord West, the former First Sea Lord and a hero of the Falklands War, said: “This is a sad day for Ark Royal but we must not get silly and sentimental. She’s been paid off and that can’t be changed - but it was the crews that made them really special.”

Any crew members out there?