Prominent Barbadian farmer, businessman, activist and environmentalist Richard Goddard has died.
Goddard passed away at his “Bleak House” St Thomas home Thursday, succumbing after a bout of pneumonia. He was 85.
A Barbadian patriot, he was the grandson of one of Barbados’ outstanding businessmen Joseph Goddard who founded the well known Goddard’s empire.
Possessing an intimate knowledge of his own family history, Richard Goddard displayed a love for the history of Barbados, describing it once as “a very rich history”.
He told an interviewer most of the material possessions which he and his kinfolk owned were earned “out of hard work and education” after detailing how his ancestors had ended up as “poor whites and landless for about 50 years” after one of those ancestors had forfeited “an inheritance of ten acres of land and two slaves” in St Thomas back in the 1600s, for a marriage which Goddard reported the family did not approve.