Neville Cardus’s death in early 1975 coincides in my memory with getting hold of two hotly desired things: Bob Dylan’s new album Blood on the Tracks, at last another masterpiece after a long, long wait; and John Fowles’s The Ebony Tower, “only” a collection of stories, unlike his zeitgeist-defining novels The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but still hugely exciting to a 23-year-old. Well, more than 40 years on, Dylan’s reputation remains largely intact, but not so those of the others. “For a long time Sir Neville Cardus was regarded as cricket’s greatest writer,” according to the sports journalist Gideon Haigh. “Then he wasn’t.”
Haigh introduces a new selection of Cardus’s essays and reportage with the appropriately evocative title A Field of Tents and Waving Colours (it is published by Safe Haven without an editor’s name). Thoughtfully arranged, and covering a span from the honeymoon 1920s to the often grumpy-old-man 60s and 70s, it includes many of Cardus’s greatest hits. “By Three Runs”, for instance, that still haunting account of how poor old Fred Tate had potential glory thrust on him at Old Trafford in 1902 but cruelly missed the moment; or “The Defeat at Eastbourne”, as the veteran Archie MacLaren masterminded the first win in 1921 over the hitherto all-conquering Australians; or “Bradman, 1930”, an early draft of history about “this remarkable boy” who was changing cricket’s very terms of trade.
These and other pieces nicely complement Duncan Hamilton’s new biography of Cardus. The Great Romantic has a strongly personal flavour, especially its tour de force of a prologue, relating in affectionate detail how John Arlott in the 70s, by this time occupying Cardus’s old post as the Guardian’s cricket correspondent, tutored the young author (working as a local sports reporter) in an appreciation of Cardus. Thereafter the interest seldom falters, the tone is mainly admiring but far from hagiographical, and there is less of the self-consciously “fine” writing that has occasionally marred Hamilton’s otherwise terrific run of books in recent years about sporting history. It is a shame perhaps that he does not take us match by match through a typical Cardus season during his golden years between the wars, or compare more forensically his reports with those of other cricket journalists of the time; there is also the odd slip (MacLaren’s “last hurrah” was not at Eastbourne but the following year at Wellington, as he took a majestic 200 not out off the New Zealand attack; Chamberlain returned with his infamous piece of paper not from Berchtesgaden but from Munich). But with its verve, insight and generosity of sympathy, this is by some way the best full-length life of a cricket writer, perhaps even of any sports writer.
Cardus’s early years are a biographer’s gift. The absentee blacksmith father, the mother and aunt who make ends meet by working as part-time prostitutes, the mean streets of Manchester around the turn of the last century, leaving school at 13, the endless autodidact hours (no influence greater than Dickens), the array of different jobs before finally landing a bits-and-pieces berth on the Manchester Guardian. Then the breakdown in the spring of 1919, the inspired decision at the start of that summer’s cricket season to give him some fresh air by sending him to Old Trafford to report on Lancashire’s first peacetime match. Hamilton does it very well, but in truth no one has told the story better than Cardus himself in his bestselling (and infinitely moving) Autobiography.
Instead, where Hamilton really scores is in his candid treatment of Cardus in the years after he won almost instant fame for his cricket writing (followed in due course by considerable acclaim for his music criticism, including teaching the English about the virtues of Mahler). This makes, for his loyal admirers, somewhat uncomfortable reading. Cardus took more than he gave in relation to the women of his life; his conversational tendencies became increasingly egocentric; the charged politics of the interwar period almost completely passed him by; and, going beyond a social inferiority complex – understandable in what was still a very hierarchical and class-based society – he seems to have craved establishment recognition and approval. Though a knighthood in 1967 was very acceptable, in cricketing terms recognition meant above all full membership of the MCC – which, grotesquely enough, was denied to him until 1972, the price of being born not only on the wrong side of the tracks, but to a real-life version of EM Forster’s Jacky Bast.
In the end, of course, it is the work that counts. Cardus was a wonderful and innovative cricket writer for many reasons – evocation of atmosphere, a rich aesthetic sense, heightening the drama of the contest, an almost uncanny grasp of what the spectators were thinking and feeling – but above all because he understood and made human, as rich, three-dimensional characters, the cricketers themselves, especially the Lancashire team of the 1920s that he followed around the country, together with a starring role for Yorkshire’s indomitable Emmott Robinson. No one before Cardus had remotely conceived in this way of cricket’s literary possibilities; and for all the excellence of disciples like RC Robertson-Glasgow and Alan Ross, as well as Arlott, no one has quite matched him since.
So what’s the problem? Why, to come back to Haigh, has he been dethroned? In essence, apart perhaps from the vagaries of changing literary taste, the accusation is that he made things up, indulging in deliberate fabrication. Hamilton faces the issue square-on, citing for instance the Cardus-written version of a conversation after a Lancashire fielder, Dick Tyldesley, had in a bitterly contested Roses match announced to the umpire that he had not quite taken a catch cleanly and ensured the departing batsman was recalled. “A fine piece of sportsmanship, Dick,” Cardus said, eliciting the understated reply, “Thanks, Maister Cardus”. That was the actual conversation, but Cardus subsequently put an extra – and immortal – sentence in the cricketer’s mouth: “Westhoughton Sunday School, tha knows”. Over the years there were many other such examples, and Cardus himself would unashamedly call it “the higher truth”.
Hamilton’s own conclusion is clear. “The admissions Cardus made about tampering with quotes damages him irreparably as a scrupulous nuts-and-bolts news reporter, but never as a critic – and certainly not as a master of descriptive prose.” That was also Arlott’s view; and it is mine, too. “Nice customs curtsy to great kings,” was how Wisden, quoting Shakespeare, once sought to exonerate WG Grace’s avaricious shamateurism. And in his own way, largely creating modern literary sports writing, Cardus was as much a great king as the original bearded wonder.
• The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus by Duncan Hamilton is published by Hodder & Stoughton (RRP £20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
