Neville Cardus - Reputation, Honours and Legacy

Reputation, Honours and Legacy

"Slight, lean and bespectacled, with a gnome-like appearance in his last years, Cardus was a familiar sight at Lord's or the Garrick Club, pipe in mouth and book under arm." Roger Covell called him "a marvellous raconteur and monologuist with his all-weather overcoat". Cardus was never an "establishment" figure. Rupert Hart-Davis and G. W. Lyttelton encountered strong resistance when they sought to get him elected as a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club, and Cardus himself came to feel like an outsider at The Guardian. However, he was always highly regarded by professional cricketers (like Donald Bradman) 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.

Cardus was awarded the Wagner Medal of the City of Bayreuth in 1963. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1964, knighted in 1967, became an honorary member of the Royal Manchester College of Music in 1968 and an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1972. In 1970, he received the received the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class. His most personally valued honour was the presidency (1971–1972) of the Lancashire County Cricket Club.

After his death, Alan Gibson summed up Cardus's impact on cricket, writing:

"All cricket writers of the last half century have been influenced by Cardus, whether they admit it or not, whether they have wished to be or not, whether they have tried to copy him or tried to avoid copying him. He was not a model, any more than Macaulay, say, was a model for the aspiring historian. But just as Macaulay changed the course of the writing of history, Cardus changed the course of the writing of cricket. He showed what could be done. He dignified and illuminated the craft".

As a music critic, Cardus was the opposite of Ernest Newman's objective school of musical criticism. Cardus's romantic, instinctive response to music was in contrast with Newman's intellectual, analytical approach. A fellow critic wrote that Newman "probed into Music's vitals, put her head under deep X-ray and analysed cell-tissue. Cardus laid his head against her bosom and listened to the beating of her heart." Despite their different approaches, the two writers held each other in considerable regard. Yehudi Menuhin wrote that Cardus "reminds us that there is an understanding of the heart as well as of the mind... in Neville Cardus, the artist has an ally".

The best of Cardus's 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. One attempt to fill this gap was Cardus on Music: A Centenary Collection edited by Donald Wright, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1988. When Cardus died on 28 February 1975, his obituary article in The Guardian was written by no fewer than three eminent writers: J. B. Priestley, Hugo Cole, and John Arlott. More than 720 people attended his memorial service at St Paul's, Covent Garden.