Every one of us has made a fool of ourselves. It does not matter when, how and where; we have all at some time acted hastily and arrogantly. For some of us, sometimes, alcohol has also been involved.
This is the story of just such an occasion. It is also the story of what it may be like to work as an archivist and writer of popular history articles: sometimes you find archival traces of an event that scream out to be the subject of an article, but at the same time it does not provide the material for more than one or two pages of text. That is why I have resisted writing this article for a long time, for fear that it would be pitifully short. Now, however, I have written it, and it is up to the reader to judge whether I too have made a fool of myself.
On the afternoon of Thursday 18 September 1884, Malmö’s inhabitants witnessed a sensational event; a carriage filled with a large number of people driving around the city streets. Normally, perhaps, a carriage full of passengers would not have attracted a great deal of attention in what was still a horse-driven time, but the fact that the carriage – in addition to the exceptionally noisy and hollering people – also contained a coffin full of spirit bottles certainly made one or two people raise their eyebrows.
One of the people in the carriage was the 20-year-old Lund student, Carl Lindell. He was born in Torrlösa, a small village in what is now Svalöv Municipality in Skåne, on 13 May 1863. His parents were tenant farmer Bengt Månsson Lindell and Cecilia Månsdotter. He was enrolled at Lund University in 1881 and was a member of the Skånska student nation’s second division. This division, called the Lund district division, had a membership comprised of students who had graduated from upper secondary school in Lund but who did not originate from the city itself. This article is about Carl Lindell.
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