Fitting memorial to singer Ruby Murray

IN the days before rock and roll, it was Ruby Murray’s records that music lovers made a beeline for. At one point in 1955, she had five singles in the top 20 in a single week.

Today, Miss Murray’s name lives on mostly in rhyming slang for a curry, but yesterday her home city of Belfast remembered her by putting up a blue plaque a few yards from where she grew up.

The Democratic Unionist leader, Arlene Foster, was among those at the unveiling.

Miss Murray’s son, Tim, said he was not concerned at the nature of her legacy.

He and his sister, Julie, were the only two people who could turn up at an Indian restaurant and say they were “going for a mum”, he said.

“She loved it, probably more than anything else. She had awards on the cabinet but that was one that really made her chuckle,” Mr Murray added.

His mother’s distinctive husky voice carried her from local fame in a talent competition at age 11 to the TV show Quite Contrary and a recording contract with Columbia. She starred at the London Palladium with Norman Wisdom and appeared in a film with Frankie Howerd.

Her re-emergence into the popular vernacular is thought to be the result of a reference on the comedy Only Fools and Horses.

Ms Murray died in Torquay in 1996, aged 61.