Origin
The source of the expression is obscure. Despite the quote's alleged nineteenth-century origin, author Nigel Rees reports in Brewer's Famous Quotations that he was unable to discover any reference earlier than the 1930s.
However, the August 30, 1916 edition 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.'"
Another early 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. I wandered into the village, and in the village shop which sold everything I found a dozen of old second-hand books. One of them was a Magyar-English Manual of Conversation containing useful phrases such as every traveller needs to know. The first section was headed 'On the road', and the first sentence in it (which I instantly mastered) was: 'Dear me, our postilion has been struck by lightning.' This is the sort of thing that only happens in Hungary; and, when it happens, this is the sort of remark that only Hungarians make.
According to its introduction, the travels reported in the book occurred during "he three years following the armistice of 1918": thus Despencer's discovery of the phrase would be dated during the period 1919-1921. In the April 2008 issue of the Quote ... Unquote newsletter, Nigel Rees speculates that the phrase "passed into general circulation" from Despencer's book.
In a 1935 issue of Punch magazine, "Look! Our Postillion has been struck by lightning" is said to be "one of the 'Useful Common Phrases' appearing in a Dutch manual on the speaking of English".
Examples of similar phrases do occur in nineteenth century phrase books. The 1870 edition of Baedeker's phrasebook gives German, French and Italian equivalents of the sentence "Are the postilions insolent?" The 1877 edition of John Murray's Handbook of Travel-Talk contains translations of "Oh, dear! The postilion has been thrown (off) down", followed in succession by "Is he hurt? Run for assistance to the nearest cottage", "Ask for a surgeon", "I am afraid that he has broken his leg -- his arm", "He has bruised his head", and finally "He must be carried home gently".
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