His own man
Neville Cardus was more than a journalist, says John Hinton. he was also a great educator

9 October 2009

Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty
By Robin Davies
Palatine Books, £25

A perfect day for Neville Cardus would be to sit in the press box at Lord's hearing the smack of willow on leather then hop in a taxi which would take him to his favourite seat in the stalls at Covent Garden where he would delight in the cadences of Grand Opera.

And as he made the effortless switch from the "gentleman's game" to the heights of music, he made notes as he went, eventually becoming acknowledged as the outstanding critic of both genres with an international reputation.

J B Priestley, responsible for the phrase "his own man", admired Cardus as a kindred spirit. So did most of those whose lives were touched by him. In the eyes of Donald Bradman, the greatest of all batsmen, he was the finest of cricket writers.

According to Yehudi Menuhin, he "reminds us that there is an understanding of the heart as well of the mind; in Neville Cardus, the artist has an ally".

Born in Manchester in 1888, Cardus was raised in loving but genteel poverty by his mother and a formidable aunt who belonged to the oldest profession, bustling out of their tenement flat into the streets every evening, dressed to the nines, to find her clients.

Neville left school at just 13, becoming a self-taught adolescent who buried himself in books and music and toiled away at menial jobs to help the family budget.

He eventually found an excellent "university" when he landed a job at the Manchester Guardian whose editor, the formidable C P Scott, gave him his first break.

His autobiography, published in 1947, is one of the outstanding memoirs of English letters; some believe it should perhaps be included on school reading lists, to remind the modern generation of how much we have lost.

For this "uneducated boy in an illiterate home", as Cardus called himself, enjoyed a life so rich that it seems sinful not to pass on its fruits. Among his colleagues on the Guardian in 1960 was the hilarious satirist and would-be playwright Michael Frayn. For a time they talked excitedly about doing a musical together. Sadly, nothing came of it.

Christopher Brookes wrote a fine biography, His Own Man, in 1986. Now comes this book by Robin Daniels, decked with perhaps too many tributes, which is ostensibly a memoir, but which really attempts to place Cardus in a critical context. There is a reminder that Scott said of the paper's readers: "Let them educate themselves up to us."

That is not an attitude that finds much favour nowadays when there is more emphasis on accessibility. And it is fair to say that Cardus, with his romantic sensibilities, is not necessarily to all tastes.

The book's title, Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty seems to suggest an aesthete rather than the talented critic and self-taught writer he was. According, again, to J B Priestley: "He might have remembered that the arts do not exist in mid-air, that we have to give some thought to the society in which those arts flourish or wither."

But he was a great critic, Daniels writes, "because he combines deep feeling and imagination with an eye that saw symbolically".

Four decades after his death, hardly a month goes by without somebody quoting him. "To go to a cricket match for nothing but cricket is as though a man were to go into an inn for nothing but drink."

C B Fry, he wrote, was "a national gallery and a theatre and a forum". By recalling his words we are paying our respects to one of the great free spirits of our culture. With the possible exception of the great Bernard Levin, Cardus helped to educate more readers than any journalist who has written for an English newspaper. He certainly did celebrate beauty, artistic skill, or "truth", as Keats had it. And he enjoyed many perfect days enjoying and reporting on his twin passions of cricket and classical music.