My father, David Jones, who has died aged 80, was a profoundly cultured man who dedicated much of his life to bringing up his children, Gavin, Rosamund and me.

He was born in Sheffield, the only child of Rees Jones, a teacher, and his wife, Olive. At High Storrs grammar school, Dad achieved the best A-level results in South Yorkshire and won a place to read English at University College, Oxford. He got a first and was invited to sit the prestigious exam for All Souls College, but decided instead to spend two years lecturing at the University of Salamanca in Spain.

He met and married Yvonne Taylor in 1960. He became a civil servant, and worked in the Department for Education when Margaret Thatcher was secretary of state. A lifelong Labour party member, he did not have a good word to say about Thatcher.

My mother suffered from severe depression. They divorced. She killed herself in 1978 when I was six, and Rosamund and Gavin were teenagers; and we went to live with my father in London. It was at this difficult time, when he was 47, that he decided to sit law exams and became a litigation solicitor, in order, he said, to provide us with stability and security.

Although Dad had not planned for his life to work out this way, he relegated his personal and professional ambitions to looking after his family. At weekends, Dad and I visited museums, the Jurassic coast to look for fossils, foraged for mushrooms or visited long barrows. If we ever needed to know anything about the Babylonians, the Minoans, the Ancient Egyptians – any aspect of history or literature – we just asked Dad. He was fun and funny.

Dad met his partner Millie Carter nearly 20 years ago and, after Dad retired in 1997, they moved to Wiltshire. Shortly afterwards, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. One of his hobbies was writing and he hurriedly published a collection of short stories inspired by life in the London suburbs, called Suburban Voices (2001). He also decided to tell Gavin that he was not his biological father. When he married my mother, he knew she was pregnant by someone else. He never knew who Gavin's father was and nor did he care.

Had life been different, had he not been a single parent and later diagnosed with Parkinson's, he might have written more books. But he was proud, I hope, of what he achieved. His children knew him well and loved him. He is survived by Gavin, Rosamund and me, and by Millie.