In Cockney rhyming slang, “cherry ripe” stands for a pipe, meaning a tobacco pipe rather than a musical or plumbing one. It works in the usual way, with “ripe” carrying the rhyme with “pipe” while “cherry” sets it up. A glossary example of the phrase in use runs: “Get me twenty cigarettes while you are out would you? and some tobacco for my cherry ripe,” which shows the full two-word form being kept rather than shortened, as sometimes happens with rhyming slang once a term is well known.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘cherry ripe’?
The words “cherry ripe” existed as a familiar phrase long before anyone used them to mean a pipe. They are best known from the song “Cherry Ripe,” which sets a poem by Robert Herrick (1591 to 1674) to music written much later by Charles Edward Horn (1786 to 1849). Herrick’s refrain is thought to echo something older still: the cry of street traders who sold cherries from barrows or baskets, calling out “cherry ripe” to advertise their fruit as fresh and ready to eat. If that is right, the phrase began as a piece of everyday trade patter long before it became a lyric.
The song went on to have a long afterlife of its own. It was a recurring theme in John Buchan’s 1919 novel Mr Standfast, and the popularity of the title is thought to be behind the naming of the Cherry Ripe chocolate bar launched in Australia in 1924.
None of this explains why rhyming slang later borrowed the same two words for a pipe, and no dated first record of that particular use has been traced. What can be said is that “cherry ripe” was already a well known, easily quoted phrase by the time it was pressed into rhyming service, which is exactly the sort of ready-made, singable tag that Cockney slang liked to work with. As a piece of slang it belongs with other rhyming coinages built on familiar names and titles, trading on a phrase everybody already recognised.