Neville Cardus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sir Neville Cardus (2 April 1889 – 28 February 1975) was a celebrated English journalist. He was a music and cricket writer for the Manchester Guardian.

John Frederick Neville Cardus was born in Rusholme, Manchester. In later life he was wont to be cavalier about his date of birth but in fact it was as shown above. His background was neither comfortable nor respectable, his mother being a prostitute, and he himself illegitimate. He had little formal education and was largely self taught by hours in the public library. From his earliest years he was drawn by the attractions of cricket (which he played professionally) and music (as a passionate amateur). Having secured the post of cricket coach at Shrewsbury School he came under the influence of the headmaster, Cyril Alington, who, spotting Cardus’s potential, appointed him as his secretary in 1914. When Alington moved to Eton in 1916, Cardus also felt the need to move on, and successfully applied for a junior post on the staff of The Manchester Guardian. The legendary editor C. P. Scott, like Alington, recognised Cardus’s talent and rapidly promoted him to the post of second-string theatre critic, then, in 1919, cricket correspondent, and in 1927 Cardus became the paper’s principal music critic, though not relinquishing his cricket role. To be paid to watch cricket at Lord’s in the afternoon and hear Lotte Lehmann as Strauss’s Marschallin in the evening, he averred, was nothing less than an act of Providence.

Apart from a few years living and working in Australia (1939-1947), the rest of his long life revolved round writing about cricket and music for The Manchester Guardian (from 1959 'The Guardian' tout court). The best of his cricket pieces were published in several volumes by Rupert Hart-Davis, but much of his writing on music – which he himself regarded as his more important work – has not been reprinted in book form.

He was never an ‘establishment’ figure. Hart-Davis and G. W. Lyttelton encountered strong resistance when they sought to get him elected as a member of the MCC, and Cardus himself came to feel like an outsider at The Guardian. However, he was always highly regarded by professional cricketers and by the greatest musicians: he managed to maintain close friendships with Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir John Barbirolli, though the two conductors cordially disliked one another.

In 1967 he was knighted for his work. In 1970–71 he was president of Lancashire County Cricket Club. He died on 28 February 1975, and his obituary article in The Guardian took no fewer than three eminent writers to write it: J. B. Priestley, Hugo Cole and John Arlott.