The Last Romantic

GH on the dean of English cricket writers

Today marks half a century since the death of Sir Neville Cardus (1888-1975), writer on cricket and classical music for the Manchester Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald. I savoured his writing; I still do. He was a man of his time, so that some of his assumptions now jar, but also, in key respects, way ahead of it. He freed cricket writing from its formulaic beginnings, licensing others to take chances with images and ideas. It’s hard to understand what we do now without him; or at least that’s what I argued when my friend Graham Coster solicited a foreword for a 2019 anthology, A Field of Tents and Waving Colours.

For a long time, Sir Neville Cardus was regarded as cricket’s greatest writer; then he wasn’t. The two perspectives may be related. What one generation exalts, the next is almost bound to despise. But there is something odd about his fall from grace, because it often feels more concerned with whether it is ‘OK’ to like Cardus, and to arise from assumptions about Cardus rather than involving the effort of actually reading him.

To be fair, Cardus’s canonical status was never universally agreed. ‘Ah don’t like thy writing, Mester Cardus,’ Yorkshire’s Arthur Mitchell purportedly reproached him. ‘It’s too fancy.’ But he is especially ill-suited to these aggressively neophilial and levelling times. Sir Neville Cardus: why, the very name is anachronistic. He must have been a posh boy, mustn’t he? Didn’t he throw in allusions to classical music? Didn’t he use fancy metaphors? Ignoring that classical music was in Cardus’s time perfectly popular culture, not least in the Manchester of his boyhood. Ignoring that in reaching outside the sporting vernacular for a fresh perspective on participants and feats, Cardus was arguably more in tune with the sportswriting of today than his own.