Neville Cardus

Who was Neville Cardus?

Sir John Frederick Neville Cardus, CBE was an English writer and critic. From an impoverished home background, and mainly self-educated, he became cricket correspondent of The Manchester Guardian in 1919, and that newspaper's 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.