When Duncan Davidson died last month, the Daily Telegraph obituary captured something of a vanished world. A former page at Elizabeth II’s coronation, he joined George Wimpey as a trainee in 1963 before striking out on his own.

Two years later, armed with “money borrowed from his fiancée’s trust fund, the limited experience of his Wimpey apprenticeship and what he once called the arrogance of youth”, he launched Ryedale Homes in North Yorkshire. He sold it in 1972 and used the proceeds to found Persimmon, which became one of Britain’s best-known housebuilders and the first pure builder listed on the Stock Exchange.