If someone suggests “going for a Ruby Murray”, they mean going out for a curry, the dish of meat or vegetables cooked in a hot, spiced sauce, usually served with rice. It’s one of the best-known pieces of Cockney rhyming slang still in everyday use, often shortened simply to “a ruby”. You will hear it used both as a noun for the meal itself and as part of a plan for the evening, as in going for a few pints followed by a Ruby Murray.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘ruby murray’?
The phrase takes its name from Ruby Murray, the Northern Irish singer who lived from 1935 to 1996. As with much Cockney rhyming slang, the connection is purely phonetic: her surname happens to rhyme with “curry”, and that chance rhyme is what led Cockneys to swap the dish’s name for hers. Commentators on the tradition point out that this is exactly how such slang usually works, borrowing a familiar public name simply because it fits the sound required, with no deeper link between the person and the meaning attached to their name.
Working out exactly when this happened is harder than the phrase’s later fame might suggest. Some slang reference sources place the coinage in the early 1960s, though no printed evidence from that period has been found to confirm it. There is also an unverified personal account from a man named Jeff Ives, who claimed that he and friends invented the phrase during a football-club holiday to Majorca in the summer of 1967. That story cannot be checked against any contemporary record, so it is best treated as one possible strand of folk memory rather than a settled fact.
The earliest example so far found in print comes from considerably later: a 1983 interview with the Cockney drummer Jeff Seopardie, published in The Standard on 24 March 1983, in which he says, “I love yer actual meat and two veg but my favourite has to be a Ruby Murray (Curry).” The phrase reached a much wider audience that same year through John Sullivan’s scripts for the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses, when an episode broadcast on 17 November 1983 had Del Boy announce he was off to “the Star of Bengal for a Ruby Murray.” Whatever earlier currency the phrase may have had among Cockney speakers, it was this documented pairing of the 1983 newspaper citation and the television exposure that fixed “Ruby Murray” firmly in the wider language.