A 1978 'The Bajan' magazine profile of the Goddard family business records that Joseph Nathaniel Goddard -- Neville's father, later known in Bridgetown as 'Old Joe' -- was born in November 1874 at his mother's two-room house on Belle Hill, Clifton Hall Woods, a remote spot below Hackleton's Cliff on the property of Clifton Hall Estate, St John, too small to be called a village. He was the eldest child of Joseph Josiah Goddard, a labourer at Newcastle Plantation (then owned by the Haynes family) who also did rum-blending and animal speculation on the side. His mother, Mary Elizabeth Jane, was the daughter of Benjamin Mayers and Mary Rebecca Mayers, believed to be small landowners of the same district; she was a widow when she married Joseph Josiah, her first husband Robert William Francis King (also a labourer) having died in 1872. The article describes the district's poverty in detail: most families fished at Martin's Bay or Bath, or laboured on the surrounding plantations; the best local prospect was to become a plantation book-keeper and, later, an overseer; there were no roads on the steep, rocky ground, and water was carried a quarter mile from Bath Spring along a footpath described as treacherous in any weather.