Music Richard Osborne
NEVILLE CARDUS A WRITER FOR ALL SEASONS
To lose cricket and live music at the same time might be termed ‘unprecedented' (dread contemporary buzzword) – were it not for the brief period after the declaration of war in September 1939, when cricket stopped and the Government ordered the immediate closure of London theatres, cinemas and concert halls.
Misled, as governments often are, by soothsayers and statisticians, they soon rethought. On 10th October 1939, the National Gallery lunchtime concerts began; and though the BBC dropped the Proms like a hot potato, the concerts themselves continued largely uninterrupted throughout the war, albeit under independent management, until the Corporation recovered its nerve and renewed its patronage.
Even so, all was not well with Neville Cardus, music writer extraordinary, who had made his name between the wars as the first great chronicler of cricket. In January 1940, writes Duncan Hamilton in The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus (due in paperback in July), Cardus walked past Lord's in the foggy dark, finding the ground ‘blind, vacant, lost to the world'. A thought crossed Cardus's mind that he might never see cricket again; at which point ‘he fell over a sandbag into a filthy heap of melted snow'.
Writing about cricket, even for C P Scott's revered Manchester Guardian, whose circulation Cardus greatly enhanced, was for him but a means to an end, ‘that end always being music'. Yet it was cricket writing in tandem with music that later in 1940 bore him to the sunshine of the Sydney Cricket Ground. Already a national hero in Australia for his cricket dispatches, Cardus had been summoned back by press baron Sir Keith Murdoch to cover both cricket and Sir Thomas Beecham's imminent (and as it turned out diplomatically disastrous) royal progress through the land.
Taking the Murdoch shilling involved compromise. To a Manchester Guardian man who had once been carpeted by
Scott for using the tautology ‘from whence' in the pages of his newspaper, it came as something of a shock to discover that the Murdoch presses neither possessed nor desired semicolons, Cardus's most treasured punctuation mark.
It was his predecessor as music critic for the Manchester Guardian, the great Samuel Langford, who told Cardus during a Roses match at Old Trafford in 1919, ‘Throw away your notebook, watch the players, and get the hang of the characters.' It was Cardus's eureka moment. From then on, he resolved to treat each cricketer ‘as an actor in a play or a figure from a novel', drawing on Dickens for narrative power and descriptive élan and Walter Pater for the more ‘aesthetic' side of his art and craft. To relish the reality, turn to the opening essay in Rupert Hart-davis's superb 1949 anthology Cardus on Cricket – as fine a piece as has yet been written on the bond between England and cricket – or those essays in Full Score that immortalise the work of such master instrumentalists as Claudio Arrau and Artur Rubinstein.
More literal-minded sports writers accused Cardus of romancing, of being loose with the facts. Even some players concurred. ‘Tha' knows tha' made me oop,' said one of Cardus's favourites, ‘the grizzled, squat, bandy-legged' Yorkshire all-rounder Emmott Robinson. Cardus denied this. ‘I enlarged him. I drew out of him what was natural and germane to his character.'
Music, to which Hamilton devotes rather less space than Cardus's earlier biographer, Christopher Brookes, came to him, as it came to many, through music hall. There was the minstrel Eugene Stratton, for instance, ‘dancing with no weight in him, feet only brushing the boards', singing the popular songs of Leslie Stuart. Then there was Edward German's Tom Jones, ‘the experience that determined me to have a long love affair with music'. And finally the revelation of Hans Richter conducting the première of Elgar's First Symphony in Manchester's Free Trade Hall one foggy December evening in 1908. ‘From now onward the sound of any chord by Elgar, played at random and overheard by chance, would bring to my mind the living image of the man.'
Such, too, is the mark of the great writer. Cardus rarely responded to the inevitable question ‘Do you play?' Only in his eighties did he write, ‘Thousands of folk can perform on some musical instrument or another; precious few can write a page of English that signs itself.'
Cardus's final match report in 1939 concluded, ‘And as the sunshine of the evening fell on the field, most of us felt that the world had grown a little less stupid than at breakfast time, when the barrage of newspapers challenged our nerve and our philosophy.' A day on a cricket field, he added, can be ‘extremely sanative.' As, indeed, can a day savouring the work, sporting or otherwise, of this incomparable writer.