Bob’s your uncle means and there you are, job done. Nobody knows who Bob was: the phrase is not recorded in print until the 1920s, which is the difficulty with the popular story about Lord Salisbury and his nephew. It is archetypically English and familiar enough here to have spawned a jokey extension, ‘Robert’s your auntie’s husband’, in the way that take the Mickey becomes ‘extract the Michael’. In a sentence it signs off a method with its result: “left over right; right over left, and Bob’s your uncle - a reef knot”, or “she slipped the officer £100 and, Bob’s your uncle, she was off the charge”.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’?
But who was Bob?
‘Bob’s your uncle’ is one of those phrases that keep etymologists off the street corners. Despite its having been the subject of considerable research, no one is sure of its origin. As with all such mysteries there are plenty of suggestions, but I’ll limit things here to the most plausible two - the favourite and an outsider:
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil
is believed to be the
source of the expression
’Bob’s your uncle’.
1. The first idea, and one that many people believe, is that Bob and his nephew were the Marquess of Salisbury and Arthur Balfour.
Like many Victorian aristocrats, Salisbury, the 20th British Prime Minister, didn’t lack for names and his was as full as his beard - Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. For our purposes we can cut that down to just ‘Bob’.
Salisbury is widely believed to be the Uncle Bob that the expression refers to. ‘Bob’s your uncle’ is said to derive from the supposed nepotism of Lord Salisbury, in appointing a favourite nephew, Arthur Balfour, to several political posts in the 1880s.
Arthur Balfour -
the nephew half of the
expression ‘Bob’s your
uncle’.
Balfour went on to become Prime Minister after his uncle, His early political appointments were considered inappropriate as he had shown no prior interest in public work.
It is unlikely that Arthur Balfour would ever have become a celebrated politician without the patronage of his influential uncle. Piers Brendon, in Eminent Edwardians, 1979, writes:
“In 1887, Balfour was unexpectedly promoted to the vital front line post of Chief Secretary for Ireland by his uncle Robert, Lord Salisbury.”
The link here between an uncle Bob who was Prime Minister and a ‘Bob’s your uncle’ passport to a cushy life is easy to make. The fact that the word ‘nepotism’ derives from ‘nephew’ makes the link seem all the more neat. Such neatness is often the mark of a back-formation, that is, an explanation that is made up after the event.
Just as an aside, a variant of the phrase has been taken up by the Greek community in Australia. They use ‘Spiro is your uncle’ to denote nepotism there.
2. The other potential source is the music hall. An early example of the phrase in print is in the bill for a performance of a musical revue in Dundee called Bob’s Your Uncle, which appeared in the Scottish newspaper The Angus Evening Telegraph in June 1924.
Florrie Forde - who
recorded the song ‘Bob’s
your uncle’ in 1931.
The expression also formed part of the lyrics of a song written by John P. Long, and published in 1931 - Follow Your Uncle Bob. The lyrics include:
Bob’s your uncle
Follow your Uncle Bob
He knows what to do
He’ll look after you
The song was sung and recorded by Florrie Forde, the celebrated music hall artiste of the early 20th century.
Eric Partridge lists it in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 1937. He states it as dating from circa 1890, although he presents no evidence for that.
The dictionaries agree on what the phrase does, whatever they make of where it came from. Cambridge Dictionary glosses it as used to mean that something will happen very quickly and simply. Green’s Dictionary of Slang calls it a phrase of affirmation: everything will be absolutely fine, there’ll be no worries. Green’s adds that it is sometimes prefixed by ‘and’.
Green’s also has an earlier printing than either of the two above. Its first citation for ‘Bob’s your uncle’ is The Stage, London, of 11 January 1923, where the phrase appears in a list of new songs. That is a year and a half before the Dundee revue, and it points the same way: the first traces of the phrase in print are in the music hall trade press.
There is also an older ‘bob’ in English that has nothing to do with anybody’s name. Green’s Dictionary of Slang carries it as a separate adjective, bob, meaning safe, out of British underworld cant, usually in the phrase ‘all is bob’. Its earliest citation is B. E.’s Dictionary of the Canting Crew of about 1698, “It’s all bob”. The word was still being recorded a century later: the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose, glosses it flatly as “All is bob; all is safe”. Etymonline draws the same line, saying that the modern phrase seems to echo the old use noted in the 1725 Canting Dictionary, which explains ‘It’s all Bob’ as “All is safe, the Bet is secured”.
The difficulty with the first suggested origin is the date. The phrase itself isn’t recorded until the 1920s and doesn’t begin appearing in newspapers until after WWII.
It would seem odd for a phrase to be coined about the nepotism of an uncle for his nephew well after both Prime Ministers were out of office.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang treats the Salisbury and Balfour account as reported rather than settled. It traces the story to A. J. Langguth’s Saki, 1981, describing Robert Cecil’s choice of his nephew Arthur Balfour as Chief Secretary for Ireland as both surprising and unpopular, and then raises this same objection about the apparent gap before the phrase was adopted. Green’s makes a matching point against the cant ‘bob’: there is no recorded chronological overlap between that older word and the phrase. Etymonline puts the attestation at 1937, the same year as Partridge’s dictionary and later than either of the music hall printings above. Each of these suggestions is separated from the first printed example by a gap that nothing found so far fills.
This isn’t the first time that an etymological outsider romps home when the favourite fell at the first fence. We don’t know for sure but, based on current knowledge, this expression most probably came into being with Florrie Forde’s song.
It is quite possible, likely even, that the lyrics alluded to the Balfour and his uncle. So, if that’s the case, both suggestions could claim to have had a hand in the derivation of the phrase.