Arthur was the oldest son of George Alfred Goddard his first wife, Rose Hannah Bean who married in 4th May 1885 in Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. George was working as a Shoe Finisher and the couple lived at Birstall Street and went on to have five children. Arthur born in 1886, Mary, Kate, George and John born in 1893 not long after the death of his grandfather also called John.
Rose died in November 1900 aged 40 and the 1901 census shows George and the children were living at 55, Hawkesbury Road in Aylestone. Arthur who was now 15 was working as a Coach Makers Apprentice, his younger sister Mary who was 13 was working as a Yarn Twister. George remarried in 1906, his second wife, Annie Lea, was living at no. 65 Hawkesbury Road, her husband had died in 1905.
The family moved to 100 Knighton Fields Road West, but by the 1911 census Arthur was overseas. By now he was a Private in the Lincolnshire Regiment, the 1st Battalion was in India in 1911, and the census shows that Arthur was serving in Aden, it also shows that Arthur was a Carpenter by trade.
On the 9/5/1915, when he was a Corporal in the 2nd Battalion, he was Killed in Action in France. He is remembered on the Ploegsteert Memorial, which stands in Berks Cemetery Extension, Hainaut in Belgium. The memorial commemorates more than 11,000 service men who died in the area with no known grave. Most did not die in major offensives, but were killed in the day to day trench warfare, or in small scale engagements.
