On his return to Britain in December 1920 from the Second Congress of the Comintern, Murphy immediately went to visit his ex-girlfriend Ethel (‘Molly’) Morris in London. Molly had been active in the pre-war suffragette campaign as the organiser of the Sheffield branch of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), involved in distributing leaflets, organising meetings and putting firecrackers into letter boxes. In 1913 she had sold Murphy a copy of the newspaper The Suffragette at an open-air meeting near Sheffield Town Hall, a regular meeting place for radical protest groups. Whilst Murphy was sympathetic to the suffragette cause, as a syndicalist he looked to industrial not parliamentary activity to achieve change. But it was the seller that attracted Murphy more than the paper and he became a regular visitor to the WSPU shop where Molly worked. Over the next two years he proposed marriage to her three times, only to be turned down on each occasion. Their paths separated when she left Sheffield to train to become a nurse, although they remained good friends and wrote to each other occasionally. On his return from Moscow, Murphy visited her at the West London Hospital, and after relating his exploits travelling across Europe to revolutionary Russia and meeting Lenin, invited her to return to Moscow with him. She accepted the proposal and two weeks later they were married in Manchester, with George Peet (the national secretary of the SS&WCM) acting as best man.