Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty by Robin Daniels (Palatine Books, £25) (From The Northern Echo)

Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty by Robin Daniels (Palatine Books, £25)

10:54am Tuesday 7th July 2009

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There will never be another cricket writer to equal Neville Cardus, says Harry Mead.

THE cricket-writing career of the greatest cricket writer almost stalled at the start. In 1919, recovering from illness, Neville Cardus, a young reporter and general writer on the Manchester Guardian, forerunner of today’s Guardian, seized the offer to report a Lancashire game at Old Trafford.

The sub editors spiked his copy, which was too long and, as they saw it, insufficiently focused on the match details. But the editor, CP Scott, sensed that the report had something very special about it. He ordered it to be printed in full.

As Robin Daniels says in this personal homage to Cardus: “Within months the quality of his writing was known and relished far beyond Manchester...

He transformed the reporting of cricket into a fine literary art.”

That nearly-stillborn first report began: “Lancashire opened the new season at Old Trafford yesterday. It was a lovely day, and a good crowd attended.

It was easy to feel the sentiment of the occasion. One came into the enclosure from the dusty town.

For many an old cricket lover there were tugs on the heart-strings as they saw again the soft green grass, glinting with the spring sunshine, and the pavilion, and, streaming in the wind, the county flag with the red rose.”

Only 31, Cardus articulated deep feelings about cricket that, for many, underpin the game’s appeal. Implicit, too, in that opening paragraph is cricket’s place in the landscape and the brief, passing pageant of summer.

From a year or two later, here is Cardus in full flow, describing play at Trent Bridge from the moment he entered the ground late: “My eyes fell on Woolley (a graceful Kent batsman, the Gower of his day) leaning on his bat. Woolley leaning on his bat is among the loveliest sights a cricket field has to show – the tall and slender shape, the inscrutable face, the air of negligent mastery. I had scarcely settled in a seat before Woolley was cutting and driving the Nottinghamshire bowling at his sweet will. He leaned on an off-side delivery and at once it was running silently over the grass with the quickness of light in summer.”

Cardus could describe the narrative of a match – runs scored, wickets taken – as well as anyone, better than most. But he had little interest in the game purely as a contest. He relished it chiefly for the way it allowed the character of the players to unfold before him. He turned his favourites into creations worthy of his literary hero, Dickens.

Of Patsy Hendren, a diminutive but hugely popular player, he wrote: “He was baptised Elias, but the crowds would have none of it. They were right too, for he is Patsy not only by name but nature. His smile says Patsy; sometimes it is so enormous that it hides the little man. One fine day he will be given out smile before wicket.”

And here he is on Emmott Robinson, a grizzled Yorkshireman, not particularly distinguished in the records but who played with a grand and obvious passion: “Robinson seemed to be made out of the stuff of Yorkshire county. I imagine that the Lord one day scooped up a heap of Yorkshire clay, breathed into it and said: ‘Emmott Robinson, go on and bowl at the pavilion end for Yorkshire’.”

Cardus’s emergence even as a journalist was astonishing. The illegitimate child of a 17-year-old mother in Manchester, he never knew his father, who deserted the mother soon after Cardus was born in 1888. He was raised in his grandparents’ home, where they took in washing. Leaving school at 13, he educated himself in the public library and earned his first money as a pavement artist. He worked as a messenger and a sweetseller in a theatre before becoming part-time secretary to a headmaster.

This led to similar employment at the Manchester Guardian, where his writing talent was quickly spotted.

Parallel with cricket, classical music was his great love, and his music reviews for his paper, notably of Manchester’s Halle orchestra, were as keenly anticipated and admired as his cricket reports.

Fellow Lancastrian Robin Daniels, author of a history of Blackpool FC, here offers what he calls “a journal of remembered pleasures”’ with Cardus, of whom he became a friend in Cardus’s later years. Laced with selections from his writings, whose appeal it analyses, the book has earned a dual launch, at Lord’s and Old Trafford, graced by the presence of many eminent figures from the worlds of cricket and music.

“He relished grace of style and glory in performance in music and cricket,” Daniels says. “His freely expressed joy – in people, in music, in the summer game, and the atmosphere of place and occasion – is stimulant for us to observe more, and with delighted senses.”

Beyond a glancing admission that the “hit-out compulsion of one-day cricket” was Cardus’s “only bete noir”, Daniels doesn’t speculate on what Cardus, who died in 1975, might have made of first-class cricket today.

But since the “hit-out compulsion”

now drives the game, increasingly played in garish clothing and under lights, it’s a fair bet he would have loathed it.

Cardus loved the leisureliness and what he called “the lazy irrelevancies”

of cricket. As Daniels notes, he once observed: “Cricket, like music, has its slow movements, especially when my native Lancashire is batting.”

In fact he got married during a Lancashire innings, leaving Old Trafford by taxi and returning later with his bride. He recalled: “While I had been away, and had committed the most responsible act in mortal man’s life, Lancashire had increased their total by exactly 17: Ellis 5, Hallows 11, and one leg bye.”

In more ways than as a “celebrant of beauty” there never was, and never will be, another cricket writer to equal Neville Cardus.

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