Pitch perfect here

This biography is a cricket writer’s homage to one of the giants of the genre, Neville Cardus, who wrote for the Manchester Guardian and was in his pomp between the two world wars when he developed a literary style of sports writing in which sporting clichés were despatched to the sin bin. But Duncan Hamilton’s excellent biography also illustrates the ruthless behaviour of great liberal newspapers (“They’ll sack you on Christmas Eve”).

Towards the end of his life, Cardus was treated shabbily by the Guardian’s editor Alastair Hetherington. Cardus, who wrote memorably about music as well as cricket, was such an eminent critic that Manchester’s Halle Orchestra, led by Sir John Barbirolli, marked his 50th anniversary on the MG with not one but two concerts. The Guardian’s contribution to this Fest was the presentation of a cheque for the miserly sum of £100. Not much help to Cardus, who had retired from the paper without a pension. He eventually received the social recognition he sought and deserved in 1967. At the age of 78, he became Sir Neville Cardus for his services to cricket and to music.

Cardus admitted in his autobiography that he was born a bastard in a back street of Manchester. He never knew his father and at the height of his fame was still regarded with distaste by severe moralists, such as committee men at the Marylebone Cricket Club. He was denied full membership of the MCC until 1972, when he was 83.

Cardus, who educated himself in public libraries, wanted above all to work for the Manchester Guardian, and it is to the credit of the legendary CP Scott that he recognised Cardus’s commitment. When Scott gave a job to Cardus, his ambition was to become the paper’s music critic, but when he admitted to some experience as a school cricket coach, he was sent to Old Trafford rather than the Free Trade Hall. Hamilton writes: “He became the first newspaperman to look at a cricket match as a reviewer…The game’s aesthetics rather than statistics motivated him.”

The aesthetics got him into trouble. Cardus was fond of enhancing a quote by adding what he thought a cricketer ought to have said. He simply made it up, sacrificing strict professional discipline to style, wit and rhythm. Hamilton lets him down lightly over this. “Tampering with quotes,” he writes, “damages him irreparably as a scrupulous nuts and bolts reporter, but not as a critic.” Finally, Hamilton introduces as evidence John Arlott’s conclusion: he thought Cardus’s exaggerations were of “little consequence”.

To put his misdemeanours in perspective, look at the prose. Take, for example, Walter Hammond’s 240 against Australia in 1938, in the first Test to be shown on TV. Cardus compared its classical elegance to the Elgin Marbles, and then pushed the analogy in a different direction: “It was the easiest thing in the world to write about that great innings; it was as easy as making love to a beautiful woman,” he wrote.

Although he was a married man, Cardus and his wife lived apart, even after she joined him when he was living in Sydney during World War Two (he admired Australia). Edith Cardus was tolerant of Cardus’s delight in the company of young women with high cheekbones, bright red lips, and engaging manners. In the 1930s he fell in love with a 37-year-old admirer called Barbe Ede. Hamilton takes some delight in the pleasure and pride she brought to Cardus’s life. She shared his taste in music and cricket, and, as Cardus added himself: “She burned a flame of sex and being.”

Barbe’s husband was an itinerant cricket writer, and Cardus may well have pulled a string when he was appointed cricket correspondent of the Sunday Times. Elton Ede seems to have been happy to share the press box with his wife’s lover, or former lover, because Barbe eventually decamped with a new lover.

Having spent the war in Australia writing principally about music, Cardus, on his return to London, aspired to become a music critic. “My cricket has been a means to an end – the end being Mozart.” Hamilton suggests that his larger public wanted Cardus to write about Keith Miller, rather than Mozart.

The very last of his women admirers was a young reporter on the East Anglian Daily Times called Liz Grice, who later joined the newsroom of the Sunday Times. After Cardus’s death, Grice discovered that one of his former mistresses had dumped an invaluable cache of his papers in the bath, leaving the tap still dripping. Liz Grice saved them. She was a better and more loyal friend than grandees at Lord’s, who refused to allow Cardus’s admirers to scatter his ashes over the outfield.