Rita McTiernan and the blossom that lasted

By Fr Jason Murphy

Sometimes we forget when we meet with people in their golden years that they were once young and may have a unique story to tell of their life experiences and journey.

As a young curate in the Parish of Inishmagrath in north County Leitrim, I met with such people - folk who harboured wonderful stories of lives lived in the midst of a landscape and a people unaffected by the onslaught of modernity.

One such family were the McPaddens, a brother and sister, Paddy and Rita, who were the essence of homeliness, whose lives, when I knew them, were centred around working their farm and caring for their elderly mother, Rita. They lived in their home not far from the chapel at Tarmon along the road that leads to Drumshanbo.

I had occasion to call with them of a First Friday, when I brought communion to their mother Rita, who was quite frail and feeble. I was always sure to receive a hearty welcome, a mug of tea, a slice of freshly baked soda bread with lashing of ‘Bo Peep’ strawberry jam once known as ‘Breffni Blossom’. There I used to linger in conversation as in all the houses I called to along the Black Road that led you up a mountain overlooking the wide expanse of the picturesque Lough Allen. In the midst of the chats over tae and soda bread, I heard about a time when the old lady was young and had a connection with the very jam on my bread.

It all began with the Laird family of the nearby town of Drumshanbo who, in the 1930s, established a jam making factory whereby local fruit was gathered in its season, boiled down with sugar, sealed in jars and sold in shops throughout the country.

But the Lairds knew that, if the jam was to sell beyond Drumshanbo, a brand name was required that could be easily recognisable on shop shelves and would hint of its sweetness and the place from where it came. So, the Lairds turned to the public in a competition, placing an advertisement in the Leitrim Observer inviting local people to suggest a name for the jam, with a prize of a five-pound note for the winning entry.

The young Rita McTiernan from Spencer Harbour, a single girl at the time, whom I had come to know some near seventy years later, read the advertisement in the local newspaper when the trees and hedgerows around her home were clothed in a profusion of blossom. As she walked the lanes, she mused over the name the jam might be called and it came to her in an instance as with a line of poetry emerging from the recesses of her mind in the springtime of the year.

She wrote the suggested name, ‘Breffni Blossom’, on a sheet of blue note paper kept for writing to relations in England and America, enclosing her name and address, sent in a stamped addressed envelope, the price of which she hardly had, without much hope of ever winning the cash prize.

But despite receiving many, many entries to the competition, the Lairds on opening the envelope sent from Spencer Harbour Post Office instantly knew they had hit the jackpot. The two words were exactly what they had longed for: ‘Breffni’ reminding of the old Kingdom from where it came and ‘Blossom’ conjuring up images of the springtime and the pink and white flowers that gave rise to the abundant fruit that locals picked in bucketfuls from hedgerows around to make the jam that was to be a staple of teatimes the country wide.

And so on Monday, November 18, 1935, the new jam factory was officially opened in Drumshanbo. Public figures, local people, workers and clergy gathered for the occasion and there standing on the steps outside the door of the factory among all the dignitaries to turn the key was the girl whose imagination had given the Drumshanbo jam its familiar name, the young Rita McTiernan.

For years to come, the name ‘Breffni Blossom’ became synonymous with jams and marmalades sold across shop counters throughout the country. It was a household brand on which housewives depended to add sweetness to bread and scones at tea times in homesteads the counties o’er. It conjured up in their minds an imagining of the lanes of Leitrim and the fruiting branches that hung from every tree.

And so it was that the young girl of Spencer Harbour and Laird’s Drumshanbo jams became forever intertwined, the old woman I used to visit of a first Friday, Rita McPadden whose life which once seemed so ordinary and every day until it was she put pen to paper and the young girl, and the woman to be, became known forever and a day as Leitrim’s very own Breffni Blossom.