“The Good Fairy”
By William F. Hanna
How long does it take 700 elementary school children to march less than half a mile? Charles H. Goodland, the mayor of Taunton, England, may well have asked that question eighty years ago this summer, as he sat on a reviewing stand placed on the lawn of the Bristol County Superior Courthouse. Joining him under the warm afternoon sun were his wife, Alice, and Mrs. S.W. Gilman, a family friend. Also present were city and state officials who had been invited to attend the ceremony. From the reviewing stand they looked out upon a sea of several thousand faces. Since this was to be an event featuring Taunton’s young people, the city’s public and parochial schools were closed that day, and so the Green and nearby streets were crowded with teachers, students and their families.
Mayor Goodland had travelled all the way from England for this. He and his party were among the distinguished guests invited to cross the pond to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the settlement of his city’s Massachusetts namesake. Monday, June 5, was to be the second day of a week-long celebration. It would begin with the arrival on the Green of the 700 small children who were slowly, slowly moving up Court Street accompanied by the city’s two high school marching bands.
As he sat on the reviewing stand Mayor Goodland had a lot on his mind during that first week of June 1939. Adolf Hitler’s armies, after solidifying German control of Austria and Czechoslovakia, were primed to move eastward, and another European war was seen as inevitable by observers on both sides of the Atlantic. Coming so soon after the catastrophic First World War, an air of anxious gloom had overspread Western Europe. The English mayor certainly carried some of that apprehension with him on his visit to America.
The children, sporting red, white and blue ribbons, finally arrived and were herded onto the courthouse lawn, where they broke into well-rehearsed song. Following that came a brief historical pageant (they were big on pageants in the 1930s) written by Joseph E. Warner. This featured older students in the roles of Elizabeth Pole, Robert Treat Paine and several other figures from Taunton’s past. A much longer version of the play was performed by adults during each of three evenings that week.
This was Mayor Goodland’s first official appearance as part of the tercentenary celebration. His ship had been delayed by ice in the North Atlantic and had arrived in Boston several hours late on Sunday, June 4, 1939. Along with the mayor’s personal baggage were numerous items that were to be given as gifts to the city officials as well as local civic and educational organizations. Among these was a small English oak tree that was to be presented to Mayor Arthur Poole and planted on Church Green, in the rear of the First Parish Church. Much to the visiting mayor’s surprise, no doubt, officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture refused to allow the tree to be landed until Goodland and his party had personally extracted every clod of dirt from its root ball. This took two hours, causing the English visitors to arrive in Taunton too late to take part in the opening day’s program. They checked into the Taunton Inn almost unnoticed.
The children’s program welcoming the Goodlands perhaps softened their memories of the previous evening’s hassle. The little ones sang beautifully, the older children presented their pageant, and the combined Taunton and Coyle high school bands drew sustained cheers from the large audience. “Simply wonderful,” was Mayor Goodland’s reaction to the performances.
When the entertainment ended, an exchange of gifts was next on the program. On behalf of his city, Mayor Goodland presented local school officials with thirty copies of a history of Taunton, England, written by an English historian. He also turned over a book of verse written by students at a Somersetshire boys’ school, and a volume containing many messages of good will from English students.
The gift presented to Mayor Goodland from Taunton’s school children was intended to be special. In the weeks before the tercentenary celebration a collection had been taken in the city’s classrooms and the money used to purchase a beautiful bronze statue called “The Good Fairy.” Conceived in 1916 by Chicago dollmaker Jessie McCutcheon, the piece was sculpted by Josephine Kern and produced by the Armour Bronze Company of Taunton, Massachusetts. McCutcheon stated that the figure was meant to symbolize friendliness, freedom and good fortune. The gift coincided with a resurgence of popularity for representations of fairies during the 1930s. Standing thirty inches high, the inscription on the statue read: “1639–1939. From the children of Taunton, Massachusetts, to the children of Taunton, England.” In order for as many people as possible to see “The Good Fairy,” the statue had spent the three days before the presentation in the front display window of the E.A. Thomas store on Main Street.
Mayor Goodland and his party were deeply moved by the present. “The gift which we have to take back to our children has taken our breath away,” he said. “It is a beautiful figure, a living figure of a right born Fairy child.”
The 1939 celebration was a great success, and the Goodlands stayed until the end. Coincidentally, they weren’t the only distinguished British visitors during that week. While the English mayor was being honored in Taunton, King George VI was undertaking history’s first U.S. visit by a sitting British monarch. He and Queen Elizabeth arrived in Washington, D.C. on June 8 and afterwards visited the New York World’s Fair before departing on June 12. The Goodlands followed two days later.
War began in Europe less than three months after that happy interlude. When the Goodlands returned to Taunton, England they made certain that every child could see the statue of the Good Fairy. We wonder today how many children of the two Tauntons were called upon to sacrifice life or limb in that war.
A happy postscript: Eight decades is a long time, but fairies never age. For many years after World War II the statue of The Good Fairy sat outside the Mayor’s Parlour at Taunton’s Deane House. In May 2024, then-mayor Nick O’Donnell ordered a custom cabinet to be built for the statue and upon its completion The Good Fairy was placed on loan at the Museum of Somerset, in Taunton, for another generation of youngsters to see.
