How Goddards Family Built Their Fortune Rags Riches Rum Reinvention

When Neville Goddard recalled bringing his teacher Abdullah “two lovely bottles of brandy, and some rum” from his father’s business in Barbados, he was speaking from a family history rooted in rum, retail, and reinvention. The Goddards rose from poor “Redlegs”* in St. John parish to become one of the Caribbean’s largest business dynasties. A rags-to-riches story woven through bottles of rum, butcher shops, and bold ventures that eventually grew into the multinational Goddard Enterprises Limited. * (poor whites or servants, name came from their sunburned skin (since they often worked barefoot and exposed in the fields) leaving their legs red) And I learned so many things from the old fellow. I came back, because I wasn’t drinking– I brought him two lovely old bottles of brandy. The best that we have on the island… two lovely bottles, and some rum. So I gave him my father’s rum, gave him the brandy.n2222 ¶1

A week later, he said to me, “Say… how long do you expect those things to last?” (audience laughter) I learned my lesson. I thought he would sip those things for a year– oh, no! They were gone! And he wondered how long I supposed these things to last for him. And of course he really disillusioned me terribly on so many things because I would go and dine with him, and Abdullah… I was then a strict vegetarian. I was trying to overcome it, after I came back… gradually. And of course he would sit down and he would have two or three big shots of rye–I mean, big shots of rye– and then he would wash down his meal with a lot of Porter, or… it wasn’t beer, it was ale… and then he would at the end, like Churchill, a huge big bowl of ice cream.n2222 ¶2

I said, “Ab, how can you do that? “Oh,” he said, “you couldn’t do it… it would poison you, because you have quibbles.” (audience laughter) “But you know that God made everything? Everything is God. You would assume that he made something and not the rest? No, God made everything. And he’ll send me back to the Bible. “Go back to the Bible and read the book of Acts. “And Peter couldn’t eat the unclean thing. And then the Lord said, ‘Slay and eat, for that which I have cleansed, I have cleansed. Then a sheet (?) came down filled with all manner of animals and food. And the voice said to Peter, “Slay and eat, for that which I have cleansed, I have cleansed.n2222 ¶3

So he said, “You have quibbles, Neville. With any of your quibbles, it’d poison you. But he would sit down and polish off this enormous meal, and wash it down with ale, preceded with three shots of rye.n2222 ¶4

And here was a man truly of the spirit. How We Got Together The Goddard family of Barbados “Neville Goddard’s family” were involved in many business ventures, including the production and distribution of rum. This was typical for Caribbean islands, where rum has long been central to local culture, both for residents and for export. One notable brand was Goddard’s Gold Braid Rum, produced under the company name Goddard & Sons, led by Neville’s father Joseph Nathaniel Goddard (Joe) and his brother Victor. Some bottles even carried Joseph’s name on the label. Neville himself once mentioned in a lecture that he brought “his father’s rum” to Abdullah.n2222 ¶5

Origins of Goddard Enterprises Growth into a Multinational Over the decades, the Goddard family company—today known as Goddard Enterprises Limited (GEL)—grew into a multinational conglomerate. They now operate more than 50 companies in 23 countries, stretching from Canada to Uruguay. Their businesses include: Although founded by the Goddard family, the present-day board of directors no longer features prominent family members. The Goddard family’s history is a well-known rags-to-riches tale in modern Barbados. Two generations ago, the Goddards were “Redlegs,” a derogatory term for the poor white descendants of servants, fishers, and field laborers. Richard Goddard’s grandfather, Joseph Nathaniel Goddard, left the poverty of the Redleg communities in the parish of St. John and moved to Bridgetown.n2222 ¶6

He became a shopkeeper, marking the humble beginnings of what would grow into one of the island’s largest businesses, involved in manufacturing, catering, and supermarkets. The following is an excerpt from three interviews conducted in 1988 with Richard Goddard at his plantation home, “Bleak House. Like many thoughtful people, Richard would often take his time to consider a question before answering, and he was deeply concerned with the accuracy of his recollections. When he couldn’t remember a specific detail, like the name of the Native American tribes he worked with as a Mountie in British Columbia, he’d continue to think about it after the interview and share the information at the next one.n2222 ¶7

Today, Richard, who is fifty-five, manages one of the family’s businesses while also running his own former sugar estate. Every morning at six, before dressing for work and commuting fifteen miles to Bridgetown, he works alongside his field hands. He tends to sixty pigs and checks on several thousand broiler chickens and a few sheep on his 166-acre property, which sits on a scenic ridge in the northern parish of St. Andrew. Richard is well-known in Barbados for his strong opinions on the decline of agricultural land and for founding the Barbados National Trust’s weekly hikes, which were inspired by his experiences in the Canadian North. “To understand my family, you have to go back to about 1620 in England, during the serious quarrels between Oliver Cromwell and the king,” Richard explained. “Many British people were looking for places overseas to escape the conflict; some went to St. Kitts and, around 1626, to Barbados. Prominent families were granted large tracts of land and brought over indentured servants. These servants had to work for a set number of years before they were given their freedom and land of their own. Richard believes his ancestors were servants and fishermen on a large estate owned by the Haynes family in the parish of St. John. Unfortunately, much of the early family history was lost when church records were destroyed by fire and hurricanes. “I know my grandfather, Joseph Nathaniel Goddard, was born in 1874. He was the one who moved the family into town and into prominence,” Richard continued. “But he grew up in Clifton Hall Woods, a very poor area. The one acre of land his parents rented was so rocky and unproductive that they only paid the landowner four dollars a year, which was half the typical rent.n2222 ¶8

My great-grandparents had a small wooden chattel house and some goats and what they called ‘feathered animals’—ducks and chickens. His great-grandfather, Joseph Josiah Goddard, was a rum blender on the Haynes estate and also an “animal speculator. In the 1920s, animals, mostly steers, were brought to Barbados from Venezuela by ship. They were thrown overboard to swim to shore, and his grandfather would stand on the beach and estimate the weight of each one as it came running up. “My grandfather started work as a yard boy on Union Estate in St. George, but he soon decided he wanted something more than working in the fields all his life,” Richard recalled. “He didn’t want to become a fisherman, which is what most of his uncles did, so he decided to go to Bridgetown to look for work. He walked the fifteen miles to town in about 1890, when he was sixteen, carrying all his belongings in a bag—just a second shirt, trousers, and a pair of hand-me-down shoes. Although there was a train, he couldn’t afford the six-cent fare; back then, an agricultural laborer only made ten cents a day. In Bridgetown, after much searching, he finally got a job as a shop attendant in a small store in Hope Alley. The area was a shantytown known as the “Ruins” because it had burned in a major fire in 1845 and had never been rebuilt. Like most of the 850 similar shops in Bridgetown, this one sold basics like rice, sugar, and salt fish. “The shop made most of its money selling rum,” Richard said. After eight years, his grandfather opened his own shop, the John Bull Bar on Tudor Street. He got a huge boost from a friend who ran a stevedoring crew. The friend paid his men every Saturday night in the shop, which meant his grandfather had a steady stream of customers who would stay to buy drinks. At the time, there was no deep-water harbor, so all cargo had to be transferred from ships to lighters and then rowed ashore, creating a lot of work for stevedores in Bridgetown. As the shop prospered, his grandfather opened a meat stall.n2222 ¶9

“He had learned to assess the value of an animal from his father. It was said that after twenty animals had run past him, he could give the total weight of the meat to within a hundred pounds,” Richard explained. “He earned a reputation for being the most accurate speculator in Bridgetown. He was a scrupulously fair man, and I think that’s what brought people to his business. He always used to say, ‘The man who raised it is entitled to something, and the man who sells it is entitled to something too.n2222 ¶10

In 1900, Joseph Goddard partnered with Norman Roach and Company to operate an icehouse on Broad Street. At the time, block ice was cut from rivers in North America and shipped to Barbados, and only the upper class could afford it at twelve cents a pound. “Most Barbadians hadn’t ever seen ice and couldn’t even imagine how water could turn into a solid,” Richard said. “When the icehouse was built, people traveled into Bridgetown from all over just to see it. The icehouse was profitable, but it was the rum shop and store that was the true start of what is known today as Goddard Enterprises.n2222 ¶11

Excerpt from Double passage: the lives of Caribbean migrants abroad and back home George Gmelch [interviewer] Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, United States, 1992 From The Bajan and South Caribbean No. 296 July 1978. pages 33-44 Bridgetown getting together to form public companies for their protection, that a 46 year old man decided to open a business under his name. His only partner was the second of his nine sons. This was Joseph Nathaniel Goddard and his second son Edward Victor Goddard.n2222 ¶12

They opened a grocery and meat and ice store under the name of J. N. Goddard and Sons.n2222 ¶13

Although Victor Goddard went to Harrison College and then took a course in Business Administration at Ontario Business College in Belleville, Ontario, the story of “Old Joe” as he became known in the city, reads like a best seller. It is certainly the Barbadian rags to riches tale of the century, and in order to illustrate the contrast between the twenty million dollar enterprise he left functioning when he died and the humble circumstances from which he came, even a brief account of his early life is worth recording. Joseph Nathaniel Goddard was born on 24th November, 1874 at his mother’s two room house on Belle Hill, Clifton Hall Woods, a remote spot under the island’s eastern escarpment known as Hackelton’s Cliff, too small even to be called a village. The land was the property of Clifton Hall Estate, St. John. He was the eldest child of Joseph Josiah Goddard, a labourer at Newcastle Plantation, then owned by the Haynes family but who also significantly did a bit of rum-blending and animal speculating. His mother, Mary Elizabeth Jane, was the daughter of Benjamin Mayers, believed to be a small land owner of the same district, and Mary Rebecca Mayers, but she was a widow when she married Joseph Josiah having been previously married to Robert William Francis King (whose labourer) who died in 1872 at the age of 52.n2222 ¶14

Life was hard, and the future a dismal repetition of hard work, little reward, practically no expectation of improved living standards, and hardly any chance of worldly wealth. Most of the families worked as fishermen at Martin’s Bay, or Bath, or laboured on the plantations of Bath, Chelston, Clifton Hall, Foster Hall, Edge-Cliff and Malvern. The best job prospect was to become a book-keeper and later an overseer on a plantation.n2222 ¶15

There were no roads on the steep rocky ground, and foot paths connected the houses of the poor whites and some blacks. Water was brought home in a bucket on the head from Ben Spring about a quarter mile away along a steep pathway that had two devilish moods, being either strewn with sharp rocks in dry weather or a muddy quagmire in between the rocks in rainy weather. The closest exit to the “broad road” was by the natural break in Hackelton’s Cliff at Monkey Jump with an entrance known as “the gate to the the south,” and the “ladders” (both natural steps cut in the cliff) to the north. Old Joe’s father rented about 2 1/2 acres of land from Clifton Hall Plantation at $8.00 per acre per year. The soil was so poor, interspersed with so many rocks, and on such steep slopes, that only 2 acres was paid for. Food was basically home grown including yams, potatoes, beans, eddoes, corn, peas etc. The family’s cows, sheep and hogs provided milk, meat (salted down in a barrel) and some cash. The price of pork was then 6c per pound. Canes, of course, were grown and when cut they were tied into small bundles, weighing about 20 lbs. each, and headed up Monkey Jump. This was an up-hill journey of about half a mile and they were then loaded on a cart to go to the factory. It took one man 3 days to head his sugar cane crop of 15 tons up Monkey Jump, from sunrise to sunset, each day for $3.00 per ton of cane. This price had to cover preparing land, planting, tending, reaping, bundling, heading and delivery to factory. This covered 16 months of labour from planting to reaping.n2222 ¶16

When recalling these conditions to his children and grand children in latter years, Old Joe would recount how his stiff neck, from carrying the canes, lasted longer than the money. Old Joe received his early education at St. Margaret’s School, in that picturesque setting near Glenburnie overlooking the wild east coast and the Atlantic rollers pounding the shores, as different from the sheltered and still air at Kensington, Fontabelle, or his offices in Bridgetown, where he spent the major part of his life, as the positions in which he began and finished it. He completed his schooling at St. John’s Boys at 14 years. His trek to Bridgetown was occasioned by an incident when he went to apply for a job as a book-keeper at Bowmanston Plantation in St. John. As was the practice of the day, he removed his cap from his head during the interview with the plantation manager, a Mr. Outram, but was advised by this gentleman that he was “too skinny” to be a book-keeper. Few rejections have sparked such determination to succeed. Old Joe thanked the manager and walked to Bridgetown (about 14 miles) where he got a job in a shop in Milk Market operated by a Mr. Bourne. He boarded with a Mrs. Murphy in King Street.n2222 ¶17

Hours of work were 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday; Saturday to 10 p.m., and Sunday to 12 noon. He would then walk home to Clifton Hall Woods to see his family and walk back to Bridgetown to be in time for work at 6 a.m. on Mondays.n2222 ¶18

He was too poor to afford travel by the railway. But Old Joe was not a man for books or accounts. From his father he had developed the eye of a speculator. The late one time Government Vet at the Public Market, Dr. Cyril Stoute, a man who was most meticulous about the accuracy of his scales, said he was always amazed at the uncanny accuracy of Joe Goddard in estimating the weight of an animal. He could look at a cow, pig or sheep, estimate its yield in body carcass, and calculate a fair purchase price to the seller while leaving a margin of profit for himself when he butchered it to sell by the pound. The story is told by a clerk who worked closely with Old Joe for many years that he witnessed him buying live oxen and bulls from Venezuela, which in those days were dumped off the cattle boat in Carlisle Bay and made to swim ashore. As the animals charged up the beach Joe Goddard estimated the saleable weight of each while the clerk counted them. As the first of the 25 animals disappeared into the slaughterhouse, Old Joe, who had been carrying the total in his head, gave his estimate. After the slaughter, said the clerk, the carcass yield of 19,000 lbs. was within 100 lbs. of Old Joe’s estimate.n2222 ¶19

This was the man who in 1920, at a time when business was becoming more sophisticated and the well established were forming holding companies and groups to protect themselves, decided to go it alone. His friendliness and fair dealing had however won him many friends who in these later years were to help him go into business on his own at 46 years of age. He went into the only line he knew – food. Joseph Nathaniel Goddard’s empire could not have been built without his son Victor and the family unity which saw six of his other eight sons eventually entering the business, along with the husband of his only daughter. Of the two who did not, one became a doctor, Dr. Lawrence Goddard, while Neville became a professional dancer, in the United States. When Joe Goddard died in 1956, aged 84 years, he left over 100 grandchildren and in-laws all of whom had a good education nor lacked the necessities of life, so many of which had been denied him in his youth. He had seen his last son John Goddard, captain of the first West Indies cricket team to win a Test series in England, while at school was his grandson Joe III who would win another of the coveted awards of this island community – a Barbados Scholarship.n2222 ¶20

A lot of the expansion of J. N. Goddard & Sons came after Old Joe died, but two of the biggest advances were the take-overs of Johnson & Redman in 1936 and C. F. Harrison in 1944. The former added only one new line in the shape of the bakery business. But the Harrison take over saw the Goddards in an entirely new field, which came about in a curious way. Old Joe, then 70, had already entrusted the fortunes of his business to the hands of his sons. However, he was standing in his accustomed spot at one of the entrances to the Broad Street store, where he would greet friends and passers by and hear and pronounce on a wide selection of topics, when his great friend and company auditor, Archibe Cuke (later Sir Archibald) happened to come along. Old Joe was contemplating the Harrison’s building across the street and, thinking aloud, he remarked: “I’d like to buy that business. “You would?” said Mr. Cuke, “well I happen to know the owners would like to sell. Negotiations were opened forthwith and one of the last English firms operating in Barbados passed to local hands. Other expansions came in 1945, when the stock-in-trade of W. S. Ward was bought out, and Goddards went into the hotel business with the purchase of the Crane Hotel, the Marine Hotel and the Windsor just after the war. They also had an interest in Sam Lord’s Castle and took part in an effort by a group of Bridgetown’s businessmen to build the projected Blue Waters Hotel at Rockley Beach. The scheme fell through because the Government of the day were still unconvinced of the benefits of tourism and refused permission for technicians to be brought in to erect the proposed steel structure. In 1960, now called Goddard Enterprises, they moved into St. Lucia with the acquisition of Peter & Co. and the following year into St. Vincent when Corea & Company and United Traders were bought. Back at home, Simpsons in Worthing was taken over in 1965 and Rendezvous in 1967. About the same time a partnership was formed with Marriott Enterprises to open the Flight Kitchen business at Grantley Adams International Airport. An amalgamation with Purity Bakeries came in 1970 and an interest in Courteay Garage around the same time. The Crane Hotel and the Marine Hotel have been sold. In all of their expansions, renovations, rebuilding and installation of new equipment where necessary, and even new buildings, have been a feature of Goddard take-overs. Their Food Fair Supermarkets in Fontabelle carried the city spread to that residential district, but at the time it was a bold move to leave the old Ice House building which they had occupied since 1924. It has been replaced by the Bank of Nova Scotia.n2222 ¶21

Mention of Sir Archibald Cuke in connection with the Goddard story brings us in contact with the career of another remarkable businessman of the city of Bridgetown. He was without doubt the financial genius of the island in the first half of this century. Yet his objectivity and patriotism as well as his sense of duty, were such that while his advice to clients and the Government made millions for them both, Sir Archibald did not die a wealthy man.n2222 ¶22

THE BAJAN, JULY 1978 “On October 13, 1921 when Joseph Nathaniel Goddard, in partnership with his son, Victor, decided to open his meat and grocery store on a side street in Bridgetown, he probably would never have envisaged that his small business would be in existence in the twenty first century or that it would have become the successful multi-national conglomerate that it is today. He certainly would not recognise the business today. The Goddard companies now span over 20 countries in the Caribbean, Central and South America and while they continue to be involved in the more traditional areas of retailing and wholesaling, they also operate in the relatively new areas of airline catering, export manufacturing and financial services. Just three years after opening the business, the Ice House Building on Broad Street came on the market, and Mr. Goddard was persuaded to purchase it. On October 13, 1924, this enlarged Goddard’s food operation in the Ice House Building, brought innovation to the local retailing sector as it was the first refrigerated cold storage meat store in Bridgetown, was converted into a supermarket business later, with a branch being opened at Fontabelle in 1962 and subsequently the acquisition of Rendezvous Supermarket in 1964. Diversification has been the key to the Goddard group’s success, and while the supermarket retail business continued to be its primary business for many years, the company also grew through the acquisition of existing businesses. The first acquisition, in 1939, was in the bakery industry which ultimately led to outright ownership of Purity Bakery, the market leader in Barbados. In 1943, Goddard’s ventured into the department store retailing and the hotel business, the latter leading to the development of airline catering services. Continuing diversification and entrepreneurial development decade after decade built the corporation into the strong position it enjoys today where it now operates over 50 companies across some 20 countries stretching from the USA in the north to Uruguay in the south.n2222 ¶23

Archive Neville’s Parents Joseph Nathaniel Goddard (son of Joseph Josiah Goddard and Mary Elizabeth Jane King ) was born November 24, 1874 in St. John, Barbados, and died November 1959 in Barbados. He married Wilhemina Ellis Hinkson, daughter of John William Ellis Hinkson and Elizabeth Ann Gibson. Children of Joseph Nathaniel Goddard and Wilhemina Ellis Hinkson You may enjoy: Neville Goddard: Marriages, Children and Family Tree: Research Notes The Finances of Neville Goddard: What He Charged for Lectures and Why He Never Charged for Private Interviewsn2222 ¶24