My postillion has been struck by lightning

An early example is Georg Wolfrum's Handbuch für Jünglinge (1825), which gives English, German, French and Italian versions of "Are the postilions insolent?

It gives English, French, German and Italian translation suggestions for a variety of mishaps which might befall a traveller, such as one's postillion becoming injured, or finding oneself in stormy weather: Oh, dear!

This reminds one of the criticism of a gentleman on Mr. Murray's "Travel Talk," when he found the exclamation, "Dear me, our postillion has been struck dead by lightning!"

[6]The August 30, 1916, issue of the British magazine Punch includes this item: An officer serving in the Balkans writes to say that he has just come across a Hungarian-English phrase-book which starts with the useful phrase, "My postilion has been struck by lightning.

"[7]Another usage of the phrase occurs in a 1932 book entitled Little Missions, written by "Septimus Despencer": It was my fortune once to be marooned for twenty-four hours in a siding of a railway station in what is now Jugoslavia but was then South Hungary.

In the April 2008 issue of the Quote ... Unquote newsletter, Nigel Rees speculates that the phrase "passed into general circulation" from Despencer's book.

[10] In James Thurber's 1937 New Yorker article "There's No Place Like Home", a phrasebook from "the era of Imperial Russia" contains the "magnificent" line: "Oh, dear, our postillion has been struck by lightning!".

[11] Olivia Manning's 1951 novel School for Love has a scene in which the landlady, Miss Bohun, is teaching English to Mr. Liftshitz using a Russian grammar from which she dictates the sentence "Coachman, the postillion has been struck by lightning.

"[12] In James Michener's 1954 novel Sayonara, the heroine Hana-Ogi tries to learn a little English from a phrasebook to communicate with her American lover and based on its recommendation starts with this phrase, much to his bewilderment.

[21] He goes on to suggest that "an unexpectedly large number of sentences, used routinely with children with language impairment, are of this type",[22] and gives as examples "That table's got four legs", and "Clap (your) hands!".