A grade II listed thatched home in Berkshire is on sale for £2.75 million

Many decades before Tony Palmer rose to the heady heights of chief executive of the construction giant Taylor Woodrow he lived in far humbler surroundings — with his wife, Beryl, in a caravan on the edge of a building site.

Palmer, then 24, was training to become a chartered surveyor and he and Beryl, who was 20, had a tight budget so they lived where he worked, on the site in Basildon, Essex.

“That’s where the work was. We were young and we didn’t have any money, so we lived there,” Beryl says.

“He was studying at the time for his examinations for the institute of chartered surveyors [Rics], so he used to go to the [building site] office to study and work at the