1856 hand-colored lithograph of the HMS Dido returning to Tahiti on calm seas, port broadside view; jury rigged with jib, foresail, mizzensail, and a complete set of sails on main mast; two smaller crafts are in the background. The ship had been damaged in a hurricane on 21 January 1856.
1 March 2021
Jury rig and jerry-built are similar, but distinct, terms and often confused. Of the two, jury-rig is the older, but neither one has a definitive origin.
Jury rig is nautical in origin and comes from an older term: jury mast. It is thought to be a clipping of injury mast, that is a make-shift mast to replace a damaged one, a very plausible explanation but no record of the phrase injury mast has been found. Jury mast was in place by 1616, when John Smith used the phrase in a description of his second and unsuccessful attempt to travel to the New World:
But ere I had sayled 120 leagues, shee broke all her masts; pumping each watch 5 or 6000 strokes: onely her spret saile remayned to spoon before the wind, till we had reaccommodated a Iury mast, & the rest, to returne for Plimouth.
A popular song by George Alexander Stevens, written in 1757, uses the phrase and co-locates it with the verb to rig, a natural choice when discussing masts and sails:
On the lee-beam is the land boys,
Let the guns o’er-board be thrown;
To the pumps, come every hand, boys,
See! her mizzen-mast is gone.
The leak we’ve found, it cannot pour fast,
We’ve lighten’d her a foot or more;
Up and rig a jury fore-mast,
She rights! she rights! boys, wear off shore
We see jury rig by 1823 in a description of the 9 April 1804 battle between the British frigate Wilhelmina and the French frigate Psyché. The context is still nautical, but here there is no association with the ship’s rigging. Instead, jury rig refers to a makeshift disguise to make the British ship appear to be a merchantman in order to lure the French ship in unawares (a tactic that you see in every movie ever made about naval combat during the age of sail):
The jury-rig alone of an armée en flûte ship of war is a great deception; and it is always in the power of the officers and crew to give a mercantile appearance to her hull, in the case of the Wilhelmina in particular, she having been a dutch ship.
By 1864, jury rig was being used in contexts completely divorced from the sea. A letter by a William Newmarch to his mother on 4 December 1854, among other things, describes the operation of an unusual type of elevator:
The cage is lifted,—I should say operated,—by the pine tree or centre male worm being turned by a small steam engine,—the power required is not great. The advantage claimed is, that the cage cannot run away and fall down, as do some of the ordinary cages, suspended by chains or ropes, because the two worms work into each other, and the cage cannot slip down. There is, however, a disadvantage: if the engine breaks down while the cage is on its road between two stories, the cage must remain there until a jury rig is fixed to revolve the pine stem again.
The origin of jerry-built, on the other hand, is completely obscure. It refers not to a makeshift repair, but rather to a shoddy or haphazard construction in the first place. It has been suggested that it refers to a builder named Jerry who worked somewhere near Merseyside, England, but there is no evidence to support this conjecture. The term is first recorded in an 1869 glossary of the dialect of Lancashire, England:
Jerry-built, adj. slightly, or unsubstantially built.
Other than this early lexical entry, we have no evidence as to where the phrase comes from or who or what jerry refers to.
Sources:
James, William. The Naval History of Great Britain, vol. 3 of 5. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1823, 101n. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Newmarch, William Thomas. Letter, 4 December 1864. Letters Written Home in the Years 1864–65. London: 1880, 144. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. jerry-built, adj., jerry-builder, n., jury, adj., jury-mast, n.
Peacock, Robert Backhouse and J. C. Atkinson. A Glossary of the Dialect of the Hundred of Lonsdale. London: Asher & Co. for the Philological Society, 1869, 45. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Smith, John. A Description of New England. London: Humfrey Lownes for Robert Clarke, 1616, 49–50. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Stevens, George Alexander. “Song 207.” Apollo’s Cabinet, vol. 1. London: John Sadler, 1757, 292. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Image credit: Effingham J. Kellow, 1856, Royal Museums Greenwich. Public domain image.