The art of cricket
An admiring book reconstructs the life, foibles and all, of Neville Cardus, one of the great reporters who raised cricket writing to the level of literature, says Rudrangshu Mukherjee
Cricket is the rare sport that has produced a large corpus of outstanding writing, some of it bordering on literature of a very high quality. One name is inextricably associated with cricket writing as literature — Neville Cardus. An autodidact from Manchester who did not even know who his father was, he worked for the then
Manchester Guardian and raised writing on cricket to an art form. His ambition was to be an acclaimed music critic. His writing on music was not extraordinary but his writing on cricket — its players, its grounds, its atmosphere, knowledge of the game — was at a different level. Before Cardus there was cricket reporting; with him came cricket writing. Neville Cardus brought cricket into the republic of letters.
Duncan Hamilton in this book not only reconstructs his life from obscurity to knighthood and fame but also brings out what made Cardus unique as a writer on cricket. This is a warts-andall biography. There is no attempt to gloss over Cardus’s foibles, and they were many. Nonetheless, this is an admiring book.
Cardus’s love for cricket grew out of his adoration of his boyhood heroes — A C Maclaren, R H Spooner (both of
Lancashire and from reputed public schools) and Victor Trumper. He saw them bat and from that memory, he created his own image of cricket — full of grace, character and artistry. He compared their batsmanship to music: famously describing Trumper’s batting in terms of the gorgeous, bannered beauty of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger.
It was Maclaren who fortuitously gave Cardus his first real break. This happened towards the end of the 1921 cricket season in England. In that summer, Warwick Armstrong’s side had not only routed England in the Test matches but had remained unbeaten through the season. For the match at Eastbourne on the last Saturday of August, Cardus found himself at the Saffrons cricket ground at Maclaren’s personal invitation. Maclaren had put together an England Eleven (“Maclaren’s innocents”, Cardus called the side) which he said could defeat the Australians and proceeded to do so under “a sky of sapphire” (Cardus’s phrase), thus breaking Armstrong’s winning streak.
Cardus was the only journalist present to witness and report the victory. Cardus was later to describe it as his only scoop. The last paragraph of Cardus’s report on the match bears quotation since it brings out the hallmarks of his evocative prose: “But the impressions of this glorious match likely to last longest are of Maclaren. One will see him, white-haired and calm, standing in the slips beckoning a man to a more judicious place in the field. One will see him plucking at his trousers’ knees in the old way, hitching them up before he slightly bends into the classic slip position. ...And if these impressions should fade in a while, surely one will never forget his walk to the pavilion at the game’s end, the crowd pressing round him and cheering — Maclaren with his sweater over his shoulders, his face almost lost in the in the folds of it, looking down on the grass as he moves for good from the cricket field, seemingly but half aware of the praisegiving around him, seemingly thinking of other times.’’ (Cardus, A Cricketer’s Book, p.255)
In the inter-war years, Cardus became a familiar figure i n the cricket grounds across England t hrough t he summer months. He seldom, if ever, sat in the press box; he moved around mingling with the crowd, hearing their comments; in many of the grounds he had his favourite spots — such as in front of the Tavern at Lord’s. His keen involvement with the game, his eye for observation and, above all, the sheer beauty of his writing won him the respect of the players, even of the hardnosed professionals who had little time or patience for what they considered the fancy stuff. Neville Cardus was, however, the exception. The cricketers, irrespective of whether they were amateurs or professionals, found that he was eager to listen, learn from their experiences and accumulated wisdom and that even though he had his favourites and his heroes he invariably wrote without prejudice.
He was a loyal Lancashire man but in the 1920s the cricketer he loved most was a Yorkshire man, Emmott Robinson. It was through Cardus’s writing about him that people got to know Robinson and his character. Cardus made him famous through anecdotes and his memorable quips and captured his overwhelming enthusiasm for the game and for Yorkshire in the following sentence, “I imagine that he was created one day by God scooping up the nearest acre of Yorskshire soil at hand, then breathing into it saying, ‘Now, lad tha’s called Emmott Robinson and tha can go on with new ball at t’ pavilion end’.”
A common charge made against Cardus by writers not fit to tie his boot laces was that Cardus made up many of the anecdotes and quips, not just for Robinson but for others as well. Hamilton shows that Cardus was not unaware of this allegation. His defence was that he never quite made up things but he did enlarge a character and add colour. Hamilton gives many examples of this but one incident sums up what for lack of a better term can be called the “Cardus method”. In the 1920s, the Yorkshire team in terms of strategy and tactics was dominated by the professional duo Wilfred Rhodes and Emmott Robinson. Both of them were expert readers of the pitch. One sunlit morning inspecting the pitch after a night of rain — the wicket turning sticky — Rhodes turned to Robinson and said, “Match over by three o’clock.” According to Cardus, Robinson responded by saying, “Half past, Wilfred.” What Robinson actually said was, “Aye, Wilfred.” Cardus’s little tweaking of the incident only adds colour and doesn’t distort the story one iota. Cricketers trusted Cardus and repeated conversations that they had amongst themselves on and off the field. This enabled Cardus to paint their characters in words.
An important component of the book is Cardus’s love for Australia where he was enormously respected as a writer. Whenever he went to Australia, there was always a standing invitation to one home — that of Donald Bradman. Cardus’s adoration of Trumper notwithstanding.
Hamilton shows that some of Cardus’s best analysis of the art of batting are available in what he wrote on Bradman. It is in these pieces — and also in an essay he wrote on “Hobbes, Hutton and the Classical Style” (in the book Close of Play) — that Cardus’s technical knowledge of the game was most evident. The memorable prose was grounded in substantial knowledge of the game that he had picked up by watching the game and talking to players. A vital element of his cricket education came from his stint as a professional coach at the public school Shrewsbury where his senior was Ted Wainwright, a Yorkshire professional with years of experience and wisdom. From him Cardus learnt how to recognise a good player.
Cardus loved artistry and character. Thus in the years after World War II, two cricketers fired his imagination and prose — Denis Compton and Keith Miller. The latter became a personal friend and with him Cardus would listen to a lot of music, especially Beethoven’s piano concertos, the Emperor being Miller ’s personal favourite.
Hamilton has written a marvellous book about a now-forgotten figure. It will be enjoyed by all those who remember and value cricket as it was once played and was once written about.
HIS KEEN INVOLVEMENT WITH THE GAME, HIS EYE FOR OBSERVATION AND, ABOVE ALL, THE SHEER BEAUTY OF HIS WRITING WON HIM THE RESPECT OF THE PLAYERS