Mary Herbert Tuffy : Short Biography

Excerpted from the memoir, The Yank, A Recollection of the Summer of 1949 

Chapter Twelve: Ruling the Roost and Other Tales of Visiting Relatives, 

by John C. Tuffy

Excitement over the prospect of seeing my Granny again surged in the weeks leading up to the departure of the Tuffy family for Ireland in June of 1949.  Granny, aka Mary Herbert Tuffy, was the only grandparent I ever knew.  My mother’s parents, John and Celia Biglin Kean, had passed prior to my arrival on the scene in mid-1938, as had Thomas Tuffy, patriarch of the Irish Tuffy clan, who had died in 1924.                                                                                                                                

I likely never would have come to know and have fond memories of my father’s mother, my grandmother, had it not been for the intervention of historical fate.  A decade after their arrival in America’s Land of Promise, my father and his sister Mona Daly (nee Tuffy), along with their brother Paddy, pooled their savings into a grand effort to bring their mother to the United States for an extended visit centered around the occasion of the second year’s season of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.  A round-trip trans-Atlantic steamship voyage was booked for their Mum and plans set for Granny to be shared among the three families for periods of several weeks at a time during the May-to-September visit spanning the summer of 1940.                                

Probably more important in the minds of the siblings, at the time, than the opportunity for Granny to visit the spectacle of the World’s Fair and experience what would surely have been the mind-boggling sights and sounds of metropolis known as New York City, would have been for their mother to meet and come to know eight grandchildren she had never seen—five Dalys and cousins Tom and Mildred, aka Teens, Tuffy, as well as the two year old version of myself, Young John.  For two of our Daly cousins, Madeline, who was born in Ireland and left in Granny’s care in 1929 and Anne, born in 1933 during Aunt Mona’s return to Ireland to bring Madeline to the United States, it would be a reuniting.                                                                                 

Everything went according to plan until the war in Europe rapidly escalated during the summer of 1940, leading to the abrupt discontinuance of trans-Atlantic passenger ship service.  That essentially left Granny with no option to return to her home in Corballa, County Sligo.  Family legend has it that Granny was not at all pleased with this unfortunate turn of events.  Although her youngest son, Uncle Tommy, was the capable proprietor of Tuffy’s Shop, Granny was nevertheless the ruling dowager of the three-generation household, which included cousins Tom, about my age, and his infant sister, Anne.                                                                            

While I’m confident that Granny was warmly welcomed into each of the homes of her three now-American children, she nevertheless could not rightfully lay claim to the same head-of-household position she had enjoyed in the family quarters above the shop back home.  The timing of one of her rotations with our family would prove fortuitous for my mother, as it coincided with her corporate coup assuming the day-to-day management of the family business, Tuffy’s Tavern.  My guess is that it would have been after Joanne joined the household in early 1943.  In any case, my mother would have had to abdicate much of the responsibility for running the Tuffy household while she tended to matters business.  So, Granny—for all intents and purposes—assumed the role of matriarchal Mammy for my sister Joanne and me.                                        

My memories of that period remain sharp and universally positive.  Granny packed me off to school in my early primary education years and was there when I returned from lessons in the afternoon, with a glass of warmed milk and maybe even a cookie or two, if I was lucky.  She tended to a small garden behind our two-flat, and I fondly remember the tart/sweetness of a rhubarb compote, a favorite treat she would prepare.                                                                           

I believe it was mid-1946 before the passenger ships that had been converted to troop ships during the war had been returned to commercial service, but I am quite sure that Granny likely booked on one of the first passages available.  It wasn’t as though she hated being in America, but I have no doubt that her heart was aching to return home.  My father hosted a grand “bon voyage” party the night before her departure in the large room above Tuffy’s Tavern and perhaps as many as one hundred family and friends gathered at the festivities to wish her well and say goodbye.  By ones and twos, fond friends she had made over the prior six years drifted out, leaving only her sons and daughter, along with their spouses and eleven grandchildren lingering to bid her a final farewell.                                                                                                             

At last assuming the position of a dowager queen, Granny sat in a large armchair greeting each as we tearfully approached.  I was likely bawling when finally it was my turn and she held me close to her breast, whispering a stern warning in my ear: “You be good for your Mammy, John, or I’ll have to come back to scold you.”  It was probably close to midnight when Granny, my parents, Joanne and I left the party room and returned to our second floor flat two doors away.  I know I cried myself to sleep that night, with the thought that I would never see Granny again.                                                                                                                                                          

So it was natural that my excitement was peaking by the time the SS Washington was departing New York harbor.  I had missed my Granny greatly and was anxious to see her again after what seemed like a lifetime in the three years since she had left.  Those emotions left me completely unprepared for what awaited in Corballa.  The almost eleven year old Young John was unschooled in the dynamics of the matriarch in a European—specifically Irish—household.   While she was always a visitor in the homes of her children in America, Granny was now home and she ruled the roost with a stern eye and tongue.  Upon her return to the household quarters above Tuffy’s Shop, Granny reclaimed the dowager Queen’s  throne she had stepped away from in the summer of 1940.   And, that meant that she could not be deferential—in any way—to her former charges, Joanne and me.  The alpha hen would have to treat us in the same way as any of the chicks in her coop.  That took a little getting used to for Young John.                                                                                                                                       

This new reality of Granny was enhanced with the knowledge that her ancestral family, the Herberts, inhabited the lands around Corballa long before the upstart Thomas Tuffy arrived from the seaside town of Lacken, in 1885, to establish his “drapery, grocery, hardware and provision merchant”  enterprise as a twenty-year-old.                                                                                 

 I don’t know who had their eye on whom, or when the eyeing began, but Mary Herbert, fifteen years Thomas Tuffy’s junior, would become the shopkeeper’s bride in 1899, having to move a mere couple of hundred yards up the Sligo Road into the quarters above the thriving  shop, it by then having expanded into the butter and egg exporting business.  The “roost” Granny presided over in Corballa included Uncle Tommy, Aunt Kathleen and their four children, my cousins Tom, Anne, Muredach—aka Murdy—and Pat.  Cousin Riona would join the household during our visit, and my father was honored by being asked to stand up for her as Godfather at her baptism, with Granny being tapped as Godmother.