Courtney McGrailAt 94 years Jack Brophy tells Geraldine Grennan about a life well-lived
As he stepped across the threshold into his brand-new home, and a brand-new life, with his beloved wife, Kathleen by his side, little did young Kilkenny man, Jack Brophy, realise that, 60 years later, he would still be turning the key in that very same front door!
Jack has the unique distinction of being the proud owner of the only original door in the Marian Place housing estate in Tullamore, which opened in 1955.
Now a sprightly and alert 94-year-old, it was purely a stroke of fate that Jack and Kathleen ended up in Marian Place. On the lookout for a house and with a growing family – they already had four young children at this stage – Jack missed the first round of applications for the new houses. “A single lad had been allocated one of the houses and when he saw us coming along with all the kids and on the lookout for a house he decided to move out, so we were allocated No. 93 and we have never regretted a day since we moved in here,” says Jack.
Influence
While his late wife was his “rock” throughout his life, it was the influence of another woman, his only sister, Kitty, who brought Jack Brophy to the Midlands in the first place.
Having served his time as a carpenter in Kilkenny from the age of 14, it was Kitty who saw an advertisement for jobs in a place called Clonsast when she picked up the local paper at the Brophy family home in Kilkenny one evening.
“Sure I had never heard of Clonsast, never mind Tullamore,” laughs Jack, “but in those days you couldn’t afford to be choosy about where you worked, so off I went to the train station on my bike the next morning and I stepped off the train in Portarlington.” The year was 1946.
It was when he moved into Tullamore to work the following year that Jack Brophy came across a handsome young girl from Clontarf Road called Kathleen Freer at a dance in St Mary’s Hall. “I plucked up the courage to make a date with her for the Pattern Day in Durrow, and we got on like a house on fire,” he says.
Never a man to waste time, it was less than two years later that Jack asked Kathleen to marry him, and they were married in 1949. Jack was 28 years old and his new bride was just 22. “We didn’t have a whole lot by today’s standards,” admits Jack, “but we were young and healthy and we were in love and that accounted for a lot.”
The young couple were quickly surrounded by a houseful of small children and eventually went on to have a family of 11, seven girls and four boys. Ironically, all but three of Jack and Kathleen’s children have settled with their own families in the town of Tullamore and its hinterland. Only one of them, Rose, returned to settle in the native county of her father. Two others, Willie and Ann, have settled in Newbridge and Wicklow respectively. The remaining eight, Mary, Theresa, Joe, Catherine, Michael, Pat, Liz and Helen have all settled in Tullamore. He has 29 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
In order to provide for his growing family, Jack Brophy had to work very hard all his life. “I was gone from early in the morning until late in the evening,” he admits, “so Kathleen had the big job of rearing the family and she did a great job.”
Given that he admits to being “a bit of a wild character” in his young days, it surprised even Jack Brophy himself when he ended up joining the Legion of Mary in Tullamore, and he has been a member for over 60 years.
Saint
“I always thought you had to be a bit of a half-saint to get into the Legion, but I liked to take a drink and I certainly was no saint,” says Jack, with a hearty laugh. However, a friend named Ciaran Camon asked him to go along to a Legion meeting one night in 1954.
“Fr Peter Clarke was the Legion Spiritual Director at the time and he liked a drink, so he was delighted when I joined because none of the other members drank,” says Jack. He thinks his membership of the Legion brought him good luck and Kay also joined and was an extremely committed member up to the time her health began to decline in recent years.
Daily prayer has always had a special place in Jack’s life and he says he also used to “nip into the chapel” every morning to say a quick prayer on his way to work. He is also quick to point out that he made his Confirmation in 1932, the year of the first Eucharistic Congress. When asked did he get to go to it, he says “indeed I didn’t, the sun was shining all that week and we were making hay, and sure Dublin was as far away then as New York is now”.
Although he is retired for the past 29 years, Jack says “hard work never killed anybody” and he certainly worked hard throughout his life.
He had a heart by-pass operation in 2004, and it was around that time that Kathleen’s health began to decline. She sadly passed away in 2013.
Jack’s own health has declined and he is now housebound but he is still very articulate, good-humoured and keeps an eye on current affairs. He never misses The Irish Catholic each week and remembers in his younger days loading up the papers on the back of his bicycle and cycling many miles to churches all over Offaly on Sunday mornings to sell the paper, never suspecting that one day he would feature in it.