Our greatest cricket scribe

Sir Neville Cardus © Getty Images

When Sir Neville Cardus, CBE, died at the age of 85, J. B. Priestley, a friend, wrote of him, 'He could write so well that I have hardly ever read a notice of his, however brief and hasty, without something - it might be just a phrase - illuminating the page.

This gives the clue to his success and to the great attraction of his work. Whether he wrote about cricket or music, about Emmott Robinson or Mahler, we, his readers, saw things in a brighter light and understood them better.

Cardus himself objected, rightly, to being known as a cricket-writer; he was a writer - and one of the best of his day. We know about his work for cricket, but he also wrote brilliantly about music and was respected and acclaimed throughout the world of music for his sensitive and acute - and very individual - criticism. We were lucky that a man of such gifts should give much of his talent to writing about the game he loved.

That he did so was a lucky accident. After illness in 1919 it was suggested that watching and reporting cricket would help him to recuperate. Thus was born "Cricketer" of the Manchester Guardian.

His was a remarkable career. Born in poor circumstances in one of the less salubrious parts of Manchester, having had very little formal education, he had a variety of humble jobs until, in 1912, he answered an advertisement in the old Athletic News and became assistant cricket coach at Shrewsbury School, helping first William Attewell of Nottinghamshire and then Ted Wainwright of Yorkshire. Later he became secretary to the headmaster, C. A. Alington, who went from there to Eton. The war came and, rejected for military service, he found himself unemployed. His desperate application to the Manchester Guardian met with success and for the rest of his life, wherever he was and whatever he did, he remained at heart a Guardian man.

When he began reporting cricket he wrote in the style usual in those days, giving the story of the day's play with very little comment on personalities and their individual styles; the facts were what mattered. The truth was that he had no intention of continuing to write about a game; music was his goal. But I suspect that the writer in him, together with his love for the game and his contact with the Lancashire professionals, with whom he travelled all the summer, made him realise that cricket was a worthy and rewarding vehicle for his art.

Cardus wrote not only with felicity and great charm about his favourite cricketers, he knew the game and was a shrewd and balanced critic of the day's play. This extract from a Manchester Guardian report of a county match in 1932 shows him at his best: "Hammond left the wicket making gestures of self-flagellation with his bat; ashes were obviously in his mouth. His superb innings should have died hereafter. For three hours today he showed us while scoring exactly a hundred runs batsmanship as grand as any you could have seen in any period of the game's history. Strength and dignity, power and poise, force with not an ounce wasted, energy expressed in calm, clear outlines; no display, no rhetoric, but cricket supremely sure of its own mastery. His off-drives were like a light reflected from the Golden Age, his leg-glances rapid and never congested. The full range of a fine offence was so closely related to a consummate defensive technique that it was hard to see where one ended and the other began."

The balanced sentences, the careful use of words combine to give a memorable picture of a great batsman. This was the sort of prose that, under the pseudonym "Cricketer", appeared nearly every day in the summer. No wonder he came to be regarded as the greatest of cricket-writers.

Apart from his books on cricket he wrote three autobiographical works. They give a fascinating picture of a man who, by his own efforts, emerged from the back-streets of Manchester to become esteemed alike in the worlds of cricket and music. The appro-priate end of the fairy tale was the award of a knighthood in 1967.

In a Cardus report you could always be sure of a vignette in prose which illuminated - that word again - the man and the play. Here is one of those pictures from a report of the Test against India in 1932: "Now came forth the Indian captain, the tall, supple Nayudu, who runs between the wickets like the visible music of flight - easeful, quick, gracious, yet commandingly. He drove Robins straight for a four - the noblest stroke of the game so far, strong and rhythmical. Then he pulled Robins to the boundary with a kind of lithe panther swoop on a bad ball."

A magic way
Sir Neville admitted that when he first reported cricket he thought more of style than of cricket, but a journalist who had been trained under C. P. Scott knew all about the discipline needed in prose and he was soon able to evolve that inimitable way of writing that not only lovers of the game enjoyed and admired. Here was a writer who had insight and a magic way with words, as well as a critical faculty that enabled his readers to have a rounded picture of a day's play, an environment or an exponent of the game.

One of the first books of his that I read was The Summer Game and I think it is still my favourite. It contains a lovely medley of all the things he wrote about so well - people, places and games played. The essay on Rhodes is a classic and among others he writes of WG, Hobbs, Trumper, A. N. Hornby and Roy Kilner. He looks back nostalgically to the time he was at Shrewsbury ('Shastbury') and there are accounts of 'McDonald v Kent' and of a Yorkshire and Lancashire battle. J. L. Garvin said of this book, Mr Cardus writes brilliantly and keeps the faith.'

That was one book: they were all like that and if I pick out one as my personal choice I am sure others would choose differently. The wise man will have them all on his shelf.

He wrote ten cricket books. Each contains treasure and all are written in beautiful English. There have been many other very good writers on the summer game, but the name of Cardus must head the list. We shall not see his like again and when he stopped writing brightness fell from the air.