Alan was born on the 18th of January 1951 to parents Pat and Bert Rush. He was the middle child with big sister Maureen, two years old than him and then Terry, nine years younger, and they lived in Hartfield Crescent in Wimbledon.

He attended Dundonald Primary School and then Pelham Road. His mother said that he never liked school very much and left with no qualifications when he was ‘15 and a quarter’. His mum worked in the meat trade so Alan got a job at a local butcher’s, George Doughty, and did two years’ day release to complete butchery training at Smithfield Meat College.

As a teenager in the 60s Alan became a Rocker, and Terry remembers his leather jacket and big BSA motorbike: “He used to race the cops up and down Streatham High Road, outside the Locarno night club”, he says. “This was in the days of battles between the Mods and Rockers, but in typical Alan style, at least two of his best friends were Mods.”

After successfully passing the Smithfield exams Alan worked as a professional butcher for some time before becoming a motorcycle messenger, much more cool for a Rocker. At one time he had three motorbikes parked along the back garden path.

At the age of 19 Alan’s adventures began. With typical ambition he decided to hitchhike alone, not to Brighton or the Isle of Wight, but overland to Australia. A family friend had been travelling there and returned with inspiring stories.

Alan took the hippy trail through Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, Nepal and Indonesia, and travelled extensively in Australia and New Zealand. One of the jobs he did was building a windmill, deep in the Australian bush, where he encountered spiders so big he could feel them walking across his sleeping bag at night. A task assigned to him was to fish out the dead parakeets from the communal water tank.

Terry remembers the first time he returned home to England, 2 years after he’d left. He says “We only used our back kitchen door, and Alan let himself in one winter evening, and just wandered into the front room where we were all sitting around the TV. He was wearing purple silk trousers and open leather sandals, despite the winter weather, with long hair and goatee beard, and the same rucksack he left home with. And a smelly Afghan coat. We found out soon afterwards that he was suffering from malaria, hepatitis, and dysentery and he spent a while in hospital to recover.

But not put off by the dangers of travel, at the first chance he is off again, ostensibly to attend the wedding of a Canadian friend he met in Kathmandu, but perhaps sensing that greater adventures lay ahead.

And I think you can see a pattern emerging… a desire to explore the most distant and open landscapes, a self-sufficiency and willingness to work hard and take risks, a love of the outdoors, an ability to make friends anywhere… with a bit of bad luck along the way.

Alan writes in the foreword to his book: “At the time I found that I had only sufficient money for a one-way ticket to Canada, but being 22 years old, single and totally irresponsible I decided to attend the wedding. On my arrival at Toronto I was issued with a three-month visitors’ permit and cautioned not to accept employment.”

But as Tamsin has pointed out, Alan was not someone to let anything as routine as bureaucracy get in his way. He found work building house extensions, and then ran a business making synthetic marble sink tops. Two years later, in 1975, he was picked up by immigration officers, held in the Waterloo County jail for three days and deported to England.

It took Alan all of six weeks to hatch a new plan. He decided to fly to the US, and return to Canada, by driving over the border under a false identity. This was only intended to be a short visit but he stayed in Canada – under the alias of ‘Steven Lawrence’ – for four years. And he didn’t return home for 11 years.

For four years, while living under his alias, Alan would write letters home to mum and dad, addressed “Mr and Mrs Rush” but signing off “love, Steve”

To quote from his biography on Amazon: “By the end of 1977 he had managed to save some money and had decided to buy a boat on which to leave Canada and cruise the Pacific. In January 1978 he bought a locally built wooden sloop twenty feet nine inches long, with a beam of six feet and a draft of three feet six, for $3,500”, – about £2,000.

“The spring of 1978 was spent in restoring ‘Balandra’ and the summer was spent in learning how to sail as he had never been aboard a yacht before.”

At this point the bad luck kicks in. He wrote, “By autumn I was ready to leave, but a week before I was to cease work, I fell from the second step of a ladder, landed awkwardly, and tore the ligaments in my right ankle. Back into hospital for another surgical repair and another three months on crutches.”

Alan finally set sail from British Columbia in April 1979, with not much more than a plastic sextant and the stars to guide him.

And of course that is where his book ‘Little Boat Big Ocean’ and his great adventure begins. Anyone who has read the book will know that it is a nail-biter. Despite the long days mending and stocking the boat, and meeting fellow sailors over coffee and rum, there are many days and nights when Alan was becalmed, or battered by storms and tossed like a teacup, or looked up to see a bigger boat about to mow him down.

And that is all before he even reaches his first stop in San Francisco!

Anyway, he makes it to Hawaii, and writes home to say he plans to sail across the Pacific to Australia via Tahiti next. His mother, writing at the time to someone else, says casually, “We don’t worry about him anymore, we are sure he will make it, so long as his finances last.”

And I think that is a tribute to the fact that Alan wrote whenever he could to his family and friends, and he was so literate and able to take them with him on his journey. They knew how resourceful, and courageous, he was.

Throughout his travelling years, Alan wrote many letters home, all of which his mum saved. Terry will read some extracts from these letters later at the HYC.

On his way to Tahiti Alan was on the lookout for a coral atoll called Fanning Island. It is one of the most inaccessible atolls in the Pacific and, lying so low in the water, not easy to spot. After days of despair, he did finally make land and soon found himself in charge of a coconut plantation there after the manager, who hadn’t had a holiday for years, saw that Alan was competent and the means of his escape. He did not return, and Alan was left holding the baby.

He taught himself the local language of Gilbertese and enjoyed the lifestyle, big house and staff that came with the job, and living in one of the most beautiful and unspoilt places on earth.

Of his many achievements on both Fanning and Washington Islands, he was most proud of the construction of both the island’s first runway and the causeways on Fanning which he was delighted could be seen by satellite on Google Earth!

Six years and many adventures later, including having to escape in the dead of night from Fanning Island with no passport when relations with the government turned sour, Alan sailed to Samoa, sold his beloved Balandra and came home.

He got a job as a security guard at the 1986 Wimbledon Tennis Championships (Terry still has a stolen official players’ towel to prove it) and it enabled Alan to quip how he had played tennis on centre court – only it was in the middle of the night!

He then set up a carpet cleaning company in 1987, which could have been the end of any adventures, except that it wasn’t quite like that.

Tamsin takes up the story: “Alan met my father, Terry Sprake, a keen sailor and Commodore of the Hurlingham Yacht Club on his return to the UK in 1986. He soon became first mate on ‘Mornings End’ and they sailed and raced for many years together and did mad things. They also gave members, many of whom only had river boats, the opportunity to sail a yacht.

“We met when he was 36 and I was 21 – the untouchable Commodore’s daughter! So we have known each other all that time but it wasn’t until 1998 that we got together. At this time, Alan was sailing his own boat and I was first mate on ‘Mornings End’. Later on in our relationship, Alan confessed to me that he used to sail to Cowes every weekend and moor at Shepard’s Wharf so that he could watch for ‘Mornings End’ to arrive in the hope that I’d be on board.”

It worked, Tamsin jumped ship to Balandra and they spent many years happily sailing together. They married in September 2000 and as the best man at their wedding aptly put it ‘If you find a good first mate, marry them.’”

They continued sailing despite the foul weather they often endured to the extent that their friends used to ask them when they were sailing and then say: “Fine, we’ll go another time”. Even their honeymoon was affected and Tamsin recalled them sitting in a bar in a Fawlty Towers-type hotel in full wet weather gear, soaked and steaming whilst waiting for a room.

They only really gave up regular sailing when they bought the house in Morden with its lovely garden and their two cats, all of which demanded their time and energy.

After retiring last year, Alan’s health rapidly deteriorated. He knew he didn’t have long left on this earth and told his loved ones clearly and remarkably, “I have no regrets, I have had a fabulous life. When asked if he had a ‘bucket list’, without hesitation he said “no, I have done everything I could have wanted.” He was pragmatic to the end.

His sense of humour didn’t desert him either. The idea of arriving at his funeral in a cardboard box, brought by a white van, tickled him pink. He died on Friday the 19th of August, leaving a beloved wife, brother and sister and many many more relatives and friends grieving at the loss of this intelligent, funny, stalwart and courageous man. He is remembered as one who loved, and who was loved.

In closing, before he first left home all those years ago, Alan wrote a poem by Tolkien in big letters with a felt tip pen across the doors of a cupboard in the bedroom he shared with Terry. Eventually when the room was decorated the cupboard was given to the next door neighbour, who put it in their greenhouse, facing our garden, where the poem remained visible for many more years, and may even still be there. Here it is:

The road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began
Now far ahead the road has gone
And I must follow if I can.