At the age of 19, Jacqueline O’Donovan abandoned an au pair job in Germany to become the managing director of her family’s construction waste company. Lucky escape for the kids, as she puts it. The youngest of five, she had left school at 16 and reckoned she would get married young, have a big family and that would be that. But when her father, an Irish emigrant in London, died suddenly in 1985 his four children decided to take over the family business and keep it, and themselves, afloat. This ambition was subject to derision from their late father’s bank…

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