Meaning
A figurative stand-in for the ordinary, reasonably educated and level-headed person, used especially in English law as the benchmark for how a reasonable individual would act, most often in negligence cases. Outside the courts it can mean the average member of the public whose common sense is treated as the measure of opinion. The phrase is British and now sounds dated or jocular, since omnibuses vanished long ago and modern usage prefers gender-neutral forms. Formal to jocular in tone; largely confined to legal writing and talk about British law, and increasingly replaced by 'the reasonable person'. Regional use: British English.
Origin
The expression arose in late-Victorian legal circles as a vivid way of personifying the 'reasonable man' standard, Clapham standing for an unremarkable South London suburb and its omnibus for everyday transport. The earliest traced judicial use is McQuire v Western Morning News (1903), where Sir Richard Henn Collins used the phrase and attributed it to Lord Bowen; no earlier use by Bowen himself has been found. An 1857 reference in the Journal of the Society of Arts to an occupant of a Clapham omnibus shows the image was already in the air. Lord Justice Greer's judgment in Hall v Brooklands Auto-Racing Club (1932-33) did much to fix it in negligence law, and in 2014 Lord Reed, in Healthcare at Home v Common Services Agency, grouped it with kindred 'legal fictions' descended from the Roman bonus paterfamilias. Popular attribution to the politician John Burns circulates but is not established.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- the man on the Clapham bus
- the person on the Clapham omnibus
- the reasonable man on the Clapham omnibus
- the woman on the Clapham omnibus
Usage Examples
- The judge asked whether the man on the Clapham omnibus would have spotted the danger sign half hidden by ivy.
- Your advertising is too clever by half; ask what the man on the Clapham omnibus actually wants to buy.
- Textbooks still parade the man on the Clapham omnibus as the yardstick of ordinary prudence.