My father, Mohammed Akram, who has died aged 68 of cancer, came to Britain from Pakistan in 1965 and began work in the manufacturing industry, initially as a machine operator at a brassworks.
Over the years he was employed on the production line by many companies in the Midlands, including the vehicle makers Leyland Daf on Drews Lane, Birmingham. In the Saltley area of the city he also worked for Metro Cammell, helping to make train carriages for London Underground.
It was a boom and bust industry in which he was frequently laid off and then rehired, but he would sometimes use his redundancy pay to take us on family holidays overseas, keen to raise our awareness of cultures outside Britain. I still cherish the first time I went abroad, on a British Airways flight to visit an aunt in Paris. That inspired me to take up French at school and then study it at university.
My father was a great promoter of higher education. Just as his father had not wanted him to follow his life ploughing the fields, he did not want any of his own children to work in factories, as he had.
He was, in fact, the first in his family to have received secondary education – in Rawalpindi, where he was born to Mirza Khan and his wife Noor Jan, farmers who kept livestock and grew wheat. At school my father graduated at the top of his class and then left, on his own, for Britain. He worked by day to make money to send home to his parents, while studying in the evening, gaining O-levels in English and maths at Matthew Boulton College in Birmingham.
After retiring from work due to an industrial accident, he settled down to enjoy his long-term interests, including reading and carpentry.
He is survived by his wife, Fazal Jan, by their five children, Naheed, Sammer, Samman, Kiren and me, and by seven grandchildren.
