Radio 3 tries to distract listeners from music by posing little quizzes and hearing quirky details of history from a ‘time traveller’. Last Wednesday we were assured that on the wagon, meaning ‘abstaining from alcohol’, derived somehow from condemned prisoners being taken from Newgate to Tyburn and having a last drink at St Giles’s.
This is definitely not the origin of the phrase. That reliable philologist Michael Quinion gave the true version in his blog World Wide Words in 1998.
The journey to Tyburn was a staple of popular miscellanies such as Hone’s Year Book and Chambers Book of Days, and earlier of fictionalised histories like Jonathan Wild (1725) and The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Those convicted of treason were dragged to the gallows on a hurdle. Ordinary murderers went in an open cart. Accounts do not call it a wagon.
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