Sir John Frederick Neville Cardus CBE (2 April 1888 – 28 February 1975) was an English writer and critic. From an impoverished home background, and mainly self-educated, he became The Manchester Guardian's cricket correspondent in 1919 and its chief music critic in 1927, holding the two posts simultaneously until 1940. His contributions to these two distinct fields in the years before the Second World War established his reputation as one of the foremost critics of his generation.
Cardus's approach to cricket writing was innovative, turning what had previously been largely a factual form into vivid description and criticism; he is considered by contemporaries to have influenced every subsequent cricket writer. Although he achieved his largest readership for his cricket reports and books, he considered music criticism as his principal vocation. Without any formal musical training, he was initially influenced by the older generation of critics, in particular Samuel Langford and Ernest Newman, but developed his own individual style of criticism—subjective, romantic and personal, in contrast to the objective analysis practised by Newman. Cardus's opinions and judgments were often forthright and unsparing, which sometimes caused friction with leading performers. Nevertheless, his personal charm and gregarious manner enabled him to form lasting friendships in the cricketing and musical worlds, with among others Newman, Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir Donald Bradman.
Cardus spent the Second World War years in Australia, where he wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald and gave regular radio talks. He also wrote books on music, and completed his autobiography. After his return to England he resumed his connection with The Manchester Guardian as its London music critic. He continued to write on cricket, and produced books on both his specialisms. Cardus's work was publicly recognised by his appointment as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1964 and the award of a knighthood in 1967, while the music and cricket worlds acknowledged him with numerous honours. In his last years, he became a guru and inspirational figure to aspiring young writers.
Family background and early childhood
Neville Cardus was born on 2 April 1888 in Rusholme, Manchester. Throughout his childhood and young adulthood he was known as "Fred". There has been confusion over his birth date. The birthdate of 2 April 1888 is as given on his baptism record; and it is 2 April when he celebrated his birthday, albeit believing that he was born in 1889: Cardus himself hosted a dinner party on 2 April 1959 believing this to be his 70th birthday. His birth certificate shows a birthdate of 3 April 1888, but this has been argued to be incorrect, since the date of registration of 15 May 1888 was such that using the birth date of 2 April would have breached the requirement to register a birth in no more than 42 days. Some sources give the birthdate as 2 April 1889, Neville's mother was Ada Cardus, one of six daughters of Robert and Ann Cardus of 4 Summer Place, Rusholme. On 14 July 1888, when the baby was three months old, Ada married Neville's father, John Frederick Newsham, a blacksmith. Cardus's autobiographical works refer to his father as a violinist in an orchestra, but there is no other evidence for this. Four days after the wedding, Cardus's father left by boat for America, with the intention that Ada follow. However, Ada changed her mind and went to live with Eliahoo Joseph, a Turkish merchant and possibly a pimp, with Ada a prostitute. John Frederick Newsham returned to England and divorced Ada in 1899. It was said that within a few years Ada and Neville had returned to her parents' home in Summer Place.
Robert Cardus was a retired policeman; Neville referred to him as receiving a small pension, although a search of police archives found no trace of this. The family took in neighbours' washing, and the household income was further supplemented by his daughters' earnings from part-time prostitution. In his autobiographical writings, Cardus refers to his home environment at Summer Place as "sordid ... unlettered and unbeautiful", yet enlivened by laughter: "Humour kept breezing in". Commentators have suggested that Cardus tended to overstate the deprived aspects of his childhood; his biographer Christopher Brookes asserts that "Cardus was the product neither of a slum, nor a cultural desert". Robert Cardus, though uneducated, was not illiterate, and was instrumental in awakening his grandson's literary interests. Theatres, libraries and other cultural facilities were easily accessible from the Cardus home.
Neville described his formal schooling as limited to five years at the local board school, where the curriculum was basic and the methods of tuition harsh: "[T]he boy who showed the faintest sign of freedom of the will was caned". There is, however, doubt as to whether his schooling lasted only five years and whether he attended a board school or a Church of England school. The experience did not curb Neville's intellectual curiosity; at a very young age he was expanding his cultural horizons, through the worlds of reading and of music hall and pantomime. When he was 10 years old he discovered the novels of Dickens; years later he wrote that there were two classes of person, "those who have it in them from birth onwards to appreciate Dickens and those who haven't. The second group should be avoided as soon as detected". His earliest creative writing took the form of a handwritten magazine, The Boy's World, full of articles and stories he had written. He circulated it among his schoolmates, until it was discovered and torn up by an irate teacher.
After Robert Cardus's death in 1900 the family moved several times, eventually breaking up altogether. Cardus left school in 1901 and took a variety of short-term, unskilled jobs before finding more secure employment as a clerk with Flemings' marine insurance agency. He lived for a time with his Aunt Beatrice with whom, according to Brookes, he had at an early age "embarked on a lifelong love affair ... In his eyes she could do no wrong". A flamboyant character, Beatrice brought colour into Cardus's life; she encouraged him to read worthwhile books and her memory, Brookes asserts, "remained a potent inspirational force" throughout his later life as a writer. She also bought him his first cricket bat.
These years were a period of intense self-education. Cardus became an habitué of the local libraries, and extended his reading from Dickens to include many of the masters of literature: Fielding, Thackeray, Conrad and—with more reservation—Hardy and Henry James. In due course he added philosophy and metaphysics to his curriculum; this began with his discovery of George Henry Lewes, which led him on to the works of Kant, Hume, Berkeley and, eventually, Schopenhauer. He supplemented these studies by attending free lectures at Manchester University, and met regularly with a group of like-minded autodidacts at Alexandra Park or, in the winter, at the Lyons café in Albert Square, to discuss and debate for whole afternoons. At first Cardus's schedule of self-improvement was random; eventually he compiled what he called a "cultural scheme" whereby he devoted a set weekly number of hours to different subjects.
Cardus's interest in music began with the popular tunes sung by his mother and her sisters in the family home. He remembered hearing for the first time the melody of the "Vilja" song from Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow, which "curled its way into my heart to stay there for a lifetime". In April 1907 he was "swept ... into the seven seas of music" by a performance of Edward German's operetta Tom Jones. "I am unable to explain", Cardus wrote many years later, "why it should have been left to Edward German—of all composers—to release the flood". He began going to the Hallé Orchestra's concerts at the Free Trade Hall where, on 3 December 1908, he was present at the premiere of Elgar's first symphony, under Hans Richter. He regularly attended the fortnightly concerts at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where students' performances were assessed by the principal, Adolph Brodsky. As part of his scheme of study, Cardus briefly took singing lessons, his only formal instruction in music. In 1916 Cardus published his first musical article, "Bantock and Style in Music", in Musical Opinion.