There were two reasons why Alec Rose wanted to sail around the world. One was to visit his son who lived in Melbourne, the other was the simple matter of having done it. Rose was 59 at the time, and working as a greengrocer in Portsmouth. He left on 16 July 1967, and got back 354 days later on 4 July 1968. They say there were more than a quarter of a million people waiting for him on the day he landed. The voyage made him one of the most famous men in the country and earned him a knighthood. Sir Alec was absolutely baffled by it. “What,” he asked, “have I done to deserve this?” He went back to work as a greengrocer.

Rose’s fame burned its traces on his home town. There’s a lane named after him near the Guildhall, sheltered housing in Gosport, and a Wetherspoon’s pub in Port Solent, and a blue plaque up near the Victory memorial in Southsea. There were plans to mark the 50th anniversary of his homecoming with a get-together in Castle Field, too. The organisers wanted to gather enough people to make “the world’s largest human image of a ship”. They thought it would take 371 but then Guinness told them that a school in the UAE had just broken that very same record and they now needed 4,883. So they abandoned the plan.

Maybe it’s for the best. Rose wasn’t the first man to sail around the world, or the fastest, he was just the one who did it with the least amount of fuss. There can’t have been a sportsman who had less interest in his own fame or the bullshit business of bolstering it. Rose had no reason to go other than his want to do so. “I just felt it was my personal affair and really interested no one else,” Rose said. He refused take on any sponsors, to “share his values” with a few choice brands. No one knew whose shirts he wore or which scents he preferred. Because, he said: “I wanted to be captain of my ship and beholden to no one.”

Rose paid for the boat, a 36-foot ketch called Lively Lady, out of his own savings. It took him 15 years to scrape the money together. He was a very ordinary sort of hero, a man who embodied qualities a lot of English people like to think we share, and which a lot of English people suspect we’ve lost. “He had immense courage, perseverance, and endurance, but above all modesty,” his friend Sir David Mackworth wrote when Rose died in 1991. “This modesty came out in many ways and I am sure it is the chief reason why Portsmouth, and then the whole country, took him to their hearts.”

He was a year behind Francis Chichester, who had just been knighted for becoming the first man to sail single-handed along the old Clipper route, around the Cape of Good Hope through the Roaring Forties to Cape Horn.

Rose planned, for a time, to race against him, though he knew he would never win. Chichester’s boat, the Gipsy Moth IV, was purpose built for the trip. The Lively Lady was built in an Indian laundry shed, made out of teak and Andaman padauk. When Rose first set off to race Chichester he got caught in a storm, collided with a freighter, and sailed home again. The press called him “the shoestring sailor”.

Alec Rose spent 15 years scraping together the money to pay for his boat, Lively Lady. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

“I felt such a fraud having a wonderful send-off for the second time in a year,” Rose said when he left again. His friends made an effort with his farewell, because they thought it would be the last they ever gave him. “They would come along and ask if it were true and express real concern.”

Rose remembered: “Quite a few believed they would never see me again. They all thought I was completely mad.” But his biggest worry, he explained, was that he wanted everyone to understand that “it was a personal adventure I have saved for all my life, and when I come back I don’t want the ballyhoo that Sir Francis got. That was just terrible.”

Rose didn’t even want to take a radio with him, but was persuaded to so he could keep in touch with his wife, Dorothy, who ran the greengrocer’s shop while he was away. “No one was more surprised,” Mackworth wrote, “when halfway round his modest adventure suddenly became big news.” It wasn’t an easy story to cover, for most of his trip no one had any idea where the hell he was. For weeks at a time there was no news at all. “Watch for Alec Rose” reported the Guardian on 15 March, and “Still no signal from Alec Rose” on 16 March, then “No anxiety yet over Alec Rose” on the 17th. The Daily Mirror and ITN even started chartering search planes to try and find him.

Miles below, Rose was busy minding his own business. “I was happy and content, I had all I needed. I had a good boat under me and felt as free as the birds that circled above, I was king of my little world.” When Rose finally re-emerged, 50 miles off the Scilly Isles, Dorothy told him how excited everyone was. “He seemed a bit dubious about the size of the reception that was planned,” she said, “and I told him that if he would do these silly things he must expect it.” Rose never made another voyage, but spent the rest of his life pootling about the south coast and raising money for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.