You haven’t got to be a viewer of the TV programme Traitors (where the phrase is used constantly) to have heard the saying, “being thrown under a bus”.

This must be a relatively new phrase as buses haven’t been around all that long.

You look at any old footage of the streets of central London and it’s carnage; horse-drawn carriages going in every direction.  I wonder if the Victorians ever said “I’ve been thrown under the horse-drawn carriage”?   There was so much mayhem you wouldn’t have known (pushed or fell?).  During the 20^th century people would have been metaphorically thrown under trams; trolley buses and rag ‘n’ bone carts.

As a kid, I’d sometimes got the bus and there’d be many a time I’d be running up Tooting High Street trying to catch one; I’d never have been thrown under one as I was never fast enough to catch the thing up in the first place.  Man versus bus conductor, as he stood, gleefully, on the platform.

I wonder how many in-fighting people at the court of Charles II were thrown under a sedan chair?  A chance of being trampled on – twice.

When London was Londinium – this was a time before decimal coinage; colour TVs and numerous plagues – were people plotting in Roman forums suggesting they may be thrown under the chariot?

Could have been worse – we could have lived in Stone Age times and been thrown under a woolly mammoth.