The man who made characters out of cricketers

On my first day as cricket correspondent of the Yorkshire Post, more than 35 years ago, I was briefly introduced to one of Yorkshire cricket's most scholarly spectators.

He looked at me - a callow youth - with an air of sociable disdain over the top of his spectacles. "If tha lives to be a hundred, tha'll never be as good as Neville Cardus," he said.

Actually, it might not have been my first day, but it was the first week. And he didn't quite say it like that. He probably rambled on more than I cared for about great traditions, and about whether Cardus, of the Manchester Guardian, or the Yorkshire Post's very own JM Kilburn, was the finer writer. And he did intimate at some point, although I can't remember how, that cricket writing was not what it was. And, I might as well admit it, he probably looked through his spectacles not over them.

But that's how Cardus would have told it, and he was lauded for it. He always imagined, he often embellished, and sometimes he downright invented, occasionally reporting matches when he was not even at the ground. But he got away with it because he was engaged in a search for a Greater Truth, and by assigning himself such a noble task, set in motion a chain of literary sportswriting that survives, albeit in many different forms, to this day.

Duncan Hamilton's biography, The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus is predictably forgiving. He sets down Cardus' daily inaccuracy without condemnation, delighting in the artistic licence that did not just record the feats of cricketers in his heyday in the 1920s and '30s but turned them into much loved characters. Cardus admired the novelist Charles Dickens, and that is regarded as reason enough to turn cricketers into similar stereotypical, often comic, figures. Hamilton also asserts Cardus' groundbreaking excellence without presenting enough justification for those who may not be aware of his work.

The cricketers of England became Cardus' extended family, a kindly fantasy from which he explored character and the human condition through the essential triviality of sport. He was born in a poor part of Manchester, an illegitimate child, he never met his father, and his mother and aunt were prostitutes. Cricket and music (because music was his deepest, truest passion) provided an escape.

In his heyday Cardus was held to have doubled the circulation of the forever impoverished Manchester Guardian, and he no doubt did during the Roses match, which he set in a harsh and unyielding northern landscape (landscape was important to him). He saw its obsessive, defensive nature as "a struggle for existence".

One of his most famous Roses match creations, the bandy-legged Yorkshireman Emmott Robinson, even played up to his image. "Robinson's fidgety mannerism and idiosyncrasies became more pronounced after Cardus highlighted them," writes Hamilton. "He wore his scruffiness like a stage uniform." Robinson told Cardus that he had invented him. Cardus explained it was not so; by his embellishments he had merely enlarged him.

Hamilton goes further than any previous biographer in examining Cardus' sexuality. He asserts, but does not really prove, that Cardus was a virgin until his mid 40s, a conclusion based on the presumption that his relationship with his first wife, Edith King, was platonic because King was either asexual or a lesbian. Quite how this connected to Cardus' own nature is delicately avoided. There is little point considering Cardus' own references to his sex life because he invented himself as much as he did the players he wrote about.

In middle age, by now spending most of his time in London, with Edith content to remain in Manchester, he began an affair with Hilde Ede, known as Barbe, another strong-minded woman with a literary bent, who he openly paraded at concerts and the cricket. Her husband, Elton Ede, soon found himself made cricket correspondent of the Sunday Times - Hamilton proposes that it was some sort of consolation prize. Barbe's death after a seven-year liaison, and shortly before the outbreak of World War II, sent Cardus close to mental breakdown.

He spent the war in Australia, unwilling to cope with the deprivation that followed. When he returned, his loyalty was to London - and Lord's - not Manchester and Old Trafford. But MCC never made him a full member, and refused to scatter his Ashes across the ground. He was knighted in 1967 for services to cricket and music, suffered a decline like the game itself, desperate for money, and died of pneumonia and arteriosclerosis in 1975 at the age of 86. Four months later, in England, came the first cricket World Cup.

Cardus' personal cricketing fantasy land had begun to lose its allure some years before he met Barbe. "What had once been paradisiacal was now purgatory," Hamilton writes. "For him cynicism became the norm. He even began to rebel against what he called his own 'romanticism', insisting that 'more cant is written and spoken about cricket than any other game in the world'." Tedium and the fear of repetition in his own writing dragged him down; in the world of sportswriting he is hardly alone in that.

Hamilton, twice winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, has written another cricket book that is bound to be deservedly acclaimed. But it is slightly regrettable that he does not explore whether strands of Cardus can still be found in cricket coverage today. He merely builds a wall between cricket's Golden Age and all that follows.

Cardus' interest in character and the human condition could still have been explored in the longer form of the game to some degree, but he did not remotely understand the value of a good news story, and many players would have found such an unremitting level of romanticising intrusive and unsettling. Television would have revealed his most flowery praise of a bog-standard off-drive in a desperate search for effect to be fraudulent. As for coping with a data-driven limited-overs age - Cardus barely even looked at the scoreboard.

But those literary strands, although hidden from view, have been handed down from generation to generation, adapting, diverging, but never destroyed. Matthew Engel was one cricket correspondent to follow him on the Guardian. A picture of Cardus, brow furrowed, pen in hand, taken by another giant of cricket writing, John Woodcock, still hangs over Engel's desk in Herefordshire. He paved the way for many who followed even if they have barely read a word he wrote.

The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus
By Duncan Hamilton
Hodder and Stoughton
400 pages, £20