Sir Donald Gosling, who has died aged 90, was the co-founder of National Car Parks, and, from 2012, Vice Admiral of the United Kingdom.

The prospects of fortune from car parking did not immediately look bright when Don Gosling and his business partner Ronald Hobson joined forces in 1950. They first met when Gosling, recently demobbed from the Navy, was a trainee surveyor with Westminster City Council – and Hobson came to inquire about planning permission for a car park on a bombsite at Red Lion Square in Holborn which he had acquired for £200. The pair became friends, and a few months later they set up Central Car Parks to operate the Holborn venture.

Post-war London had many vacant areas of land, few parking restrictions and a relatively small population of private cars. In their first few months, charging one and sixpence a time, Gosling and Hobson often booked in no more than a dozen cars a day, though they had space for 120.

As car usage grew, however, so did demand for their offering; more bombsites were acquired, and in 1959 Gosling and Hobson took over an existing business called National Car Parks and merged it with their own.

Eventually they owned more than 500 town-centre car parks – some 70 per cent of the parking market in the UK – as well as petrol stations, the Green Flag breakdown service, and airport buses. The business was steadily lucrative and employed more than 40,000 staff, but for many years the founders resisted takeover approaches and the temptations of stock-exchange listing, maintaining a discreet management style.

In 1998, however, NCP’s parent company National Parking Corporation was sold to the New York-based conglomerate Cendant Corporation for more than £800 million, Gosling, Hobson and their family trusts sharing some £580 million between them.

Frederick Donald Gosling was born in south London on March 2 1929, the son of a publican. Visits to see the warships in Portsmouth Harbour as a lad inspired an ambition to go to sea, and at 13, in 1943, he was accepted at the boys’ training ship normally housed on a hulk in the Thames, the former HMS Arethusa (now Shaftesbury Young People), but evacuated owing to the war to a hotel at Salcombe in Devon.

The following year he left training to join up, and from 1946 he served in the cruiser HMS Leander, based in Malta, for what he called “two action-packed years”.

Gosling loved the Navy. It was, he recalled, “the blackest day of my life … when I was told I had to leave in 1949 because of the post-war rundown of the Services. I was heartbroken.” For the rest of his life he maintained his connection to the sea as the owner of a succession of handsome motor yachts, and as a strong benefactor of naval and maritime charities.

One of his most recent donations was £1 million to ensure the future of the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, a gift which was uniquely marked by the placing of a carved stone plaque in the floor of the Painted Hall.

He was president of the White Ensign Association, vice-president of Seafarers UK (formerly the King George’s Fund for Sailors), a trustee of the Fleet Air Arm Museum and the Royal Yachting Association Seamanship Foundation, a patron of the Submarine Memorial Appeal and HMS Ark Royal Welfare Trust, and a Younger Brother of Trinity House.

His dedication was recognised by honorary rank in the Royal Naval Reserve; he was promoted Rear Admiral in 2009 and Vice Admiral in 2015. In 2012 the Queen made him Vice Admiral of the United Kingdom, a ceremonial appointment within her personal gift.

An ardent royalist, Gosling proposed that businessmen like himself should club together to fund a replacement Royal Yacht when Britannia was decommissioned in 1997, offering £5 million of his own money. He placed his 75 m superyacht, named Leander after the ship he had served in as a young man, and manned by a crew of 22, at the disposal of the Navy and members of the Royal family – though the Duchess of Cornwall was reported to have suffered seasickness on board.

When the Earl and Countess of Wessex toured the Caribbean in 2012 for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in a Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel that proved too big for some island ports, Leander was dispatched to save their embarrassment.

In 1997, when Gosling heard that the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Splendid had been on patrol continuously for several weeks during the Kosovo crisis, he arranged a rendezvous at sea, visited the submarine with gifts of fruit and chocolate, and offered the crew showers in Leander.

Among Gosling’s other vessels was a 10ft Thames barge, called Maisie after his mother. He made Maisie available for secret staff talks between the British and Russian navies.

Gosling was a gregarious, good-humoured figure who loved a party and was a member of the charitable Saints and Sinners Club and the Grand Order of Water Rats. According to one report, “stars such as Joan Collins, Jimmy Tarbuck, Tim Rice and the Duchess of York [partied] the night away [aboard his yacht] to the strains of The Girl From Ipanema, a Gosling favourite.”

The broadcaster Ned Sherrin called him “a jolly, generous fellow, all-embracing in his enthusiasms”, and Gosling generated great loyalty from his staff, many of whom remained in his employment for more than 30 years – his deputy chairman, Gordon Layton, for 60.     

As for his political affiliations, Gosling was one of several “adventurous business gentlemen” (in Roy Jenkins’s words) knighted in Harold Wilson’s “lavender list” of resignation honours in May 1976: others included the financier Jimmy Goldsmith and the industrialist James Hanson.

Some who knew Gosling believed him to have been a socialist at heart until the advent of Margaret Thatcher – whose cause he embraced with the zeal of a convert. Gosling and his wife became regular guests at Chequers during her tenure and in 1991 he donated £200,000 to the Margaret Thatcher Foundation.

Gosling was raised to KCVO in 2004 in recognition of his charitable work; the more reclusive Ronald Hobson, who was reported to have refused an honour from Wilson, also became KCVO. After the sale of NCP, the two remained close friends and partners in property ventures which added to their wealth and as trustees of each other’s charitable trusts – of which the Gosling Foundation gave at least £2 million a year to a variety of endeavours.

In 2014, having heard that the ship might be sold as an amusement attraction, Gosling donated £25 million to save HMS Victory for the nation. Altogether he gave more than £100 million to worthy causes.

Don Gosling married, in 1959, Shauna Ingram, whose family were proprietors of Palmer & Harvey, a wholesale confectioner and tobacconist of which he became a director and later chairman. They had three sons. The marriage was dissolved in 1988, and his companion of later years was Gabriella Di Nora, a former head of personal shopping at Selfridges.

Sir Donald Gosling, born March 2 1929, died September 16 2019