My father, Ed Ferrett, who has died aged 83, was an engineer and an author. After a career in tertiary education leadership, he embarked during his 50s on what became a highly successful second career in health and safety.

With Phil Hughes, chair of the National Examination Board in Occupational Safety and Health (Nebosh), Ed wrote several course textbooks for key health and safety qualifications, and he served for some years as Phil’s vice-chair.

Ed was born during the second world war in Watford, Hertfordshire, the oldest of three sons of Nellie (nee Lane), a housewife and wartime factory worker, and Basil Ferrett, who worked at Odhams Press in Watford. After attending Watford grammar school for boys and taking an apprenticeship at the de Havilland Aircraft Company, he studied engineering at the University of Nottingham, gaining both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate.

Like his time at grammar school, Ed’s period at Nottingham made a huge intellectual impression on him. He enjoyed discussions with the philosophy students and passed an appreciation for Beyond the Fringe-type parodies of famous philosophers on to me.

It was also in Nottingham that Ed met, in the university’s Labour club, Jill Garrett, an economics student from Devon. They married in 1970 and shortly afterwards moved to Illogan in Cornwall. Ed worked first as a lecturer in engineering at the Camborne School of Mines (now part of the University of Exeter) in the 70s and from around 1980 at Cornwall College, a further education college in Camborne, as head of its faculty of technology.

In the course of his work, Ed visited gold mines in apartheid South Africa, and the very harsh working conditions of the black miners had a big impact on him. He started to get interested in health and safety, and after his early retirement from Cornwall College in the mid-90s, he became involved with Nebosh.

After that he never formally retired, but reduced his commitments after about 2015 – and he stopped working completely after a diagnosis with lung cancer in 2020.

Throughout his life, Dad was keenly interested in current affairs and economic policy. He was a key Labour activist in Cornwall for decades, although he later left the party. He also loved the outdoors – gardening, country walks near the family home in Cornwall, and walking holidays in the Lake District.

He is survived by Jill, their children, Hannah and me, two grandchildren, Rory and Eva, and his brother, Ron.