‘Guilty, M'Lud, to Fiction’: Neville Cardus and the Moment of Scrutiny

Abstract

This article contextualizes the canonical cricket writings of Sir Neville Cardus by placing them alongside the work of the influential Scrutiny group, an intellectual formation led by F.R. and Q.D. Leavis established at Cambridge University in the early 1930s. Scrutiny identified that in the change from a pre-industrial to an industrial society, popular culture had become the product of manipulative and philistine entrepreneurs. As a response to this they advocated the maintenance of critical standards and sought to place cultural criticism in the hands of an elite. Against the background of Scrutiny's perceptions, this article suggests that Cardus's often highly fictionalized inter-war cricket writings registered, and attempted to reconcile symbolically, a number of the cultural and ideological tensions of the period.

Notes

1. Arthur Ratcliffe, ed., Prose of our time (London, 1931), pp. 68–78; The English Association, English essays of today (Oxford, 1936), pp. 30–4.

2. Neville Cardus, Autobiography (London, 1947), pp. 183–4.

3. Neville Cardus, ‘Cricket’, in Our way of life: Twelve aspects of the British heritage (London, 1951), pp. 141–52.

4. Quoted in Christopher Brookes, His own man: The life of Neville Cardus (London, 1985), p. 6.

5. Neville Cardus, ‘The batsmanship of manners’ and ‘Good days’, in Dennis Walder, ed., Literature in the modern world: Critical essays and documents (Oxford, 1990), pp. 171–5; ‘Cricket at Shastbury’, in Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, eds, Writing Englishness 1900–1950 (London, 1995) pp. 169–73.

6. Matthew Engel, ‘Introduction’ to J.M. Kilburn, In search of cricket (London, 1990), p. i.

7. For an excellent overview of cricket during the period see Jack Williams, Cricket and England: A cultural and social history of the inter-war years (London, 1999). Here the point is made that ‘Much literary critical acclaim was lavished on the cricket books of Neville Cardus’ (p. 69).

8. Francis Mulhern, The moment of Scrutiny (London, 1979), p. 7.

9. David Ayerst, Guardian: Biography of a newspaper (London, 1971).

10. F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and environment (London, 1933), p 53.

11. Derek Birley, The willow wand: Some cricket myths explored (London, 1979), p. 113.

12. Cardus, Autobiography, p. 136.

13. Leavis and Thompson, Culture and environment, pp. 79–92.

14. Cardus, Autobiography. With its narrative of rags to cultural riches, Cardus's autobiographical writings are a fascinating example of the fictional quality of this genre.

15. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, literature and conservatism between the wars (London, 1991), p. 69.

16. Cardus, Autobiography, pp. 127–8.

17. Neville Cardus, Days in the sun (London, 1924), p. 15.

18. Neville Cardus, Days in the sun (London, 1924), p. 55.

19. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (London, 1984), p. 143.

20. Mulhern, The moment of Scrutiny, p. 35.

21. Cardus, Days in the sun, pp. 223–4.

22. Quoted in Alistair McLellan, ed., Nothing sacred: The new cricket culture (London, 1996), p. 128.

23. Mulhern, The moment of Scrutiny, p. 58.

24. Cardus, Days in the sun, p. 87.

25. Mulhern, The moment of Scrutiny, p. 52.

26. T.S. Eliot, ‘Marie Lloyd’ in Selected prose (London, 1975), pp. 172–4; Cardus, Autobiography, p. 17.

27. Jeff Hill, ‘Reading the stars: Towards a post-modern approach to sports history’, The Sports Historian, 14 (1) (1994), p. 52.

28. Mulhern, The moment of Scrutiny, p. 52.

29. Neville Cardus, English Cricket (London, 1945), p. 14.

30. Pelham Warner, ‘Foreword’ to F.A.H. Henley, The boy's book of cricket (London, 1924), v–vi.

31. Howard Marshall, ed., Cricket stories (London, 1933), p. 45.

32. Hugh de Selincourt, ‘Over!’: Some personal remarks on the game of cricket (London, 1932), p. 18.

33. Cardus, Days in the sun, p. 188.

34. Cardus, Days in the sun, p. 135.

35. Cardus, Days in the sun, pp. 55–6.

36. Walter Bagehot, ‘Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or pure, ornate and grotesque art in English poetry’, in The collected works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 2 (London, 1965), p. 365.

37. Mulhern, The moment of Scrutiny, p. 39.

38. Cardus, Days in the sun, p. 62.

39. Cardus, Autobiography, p. 193.

40. Neville Cardus, The summer game (London, 1929), p. 8.

41. Cardus, Days in the sun, p. 89.

42. Cardus, Days in the sun, p. 27.

43. Neville Cardus, A cricketer's book (London, 1922), p. 13.

44. Leavis and Thompson, Culture and environment, pp. 64–7. For a discussion of ‘Leavis: sport and the “organic community”’, see John Hughson, David Inglis and Marcus Free, The uses of sport (London, 2005), pp. 16–20. For Leavis's personal attitude to sport see John Bale, Anti-sport sentiments in literature: Batting for the opposition (London, 2008), p.10.

45. Ric Sissons, Review of Christopher Brookes, His own man: The life of Neville Cardus, Sporting Traditions 2 (1) (1985), pp. 79–81.

46. Martin Weiner, English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit 1850–1980 (London, 1985), p. 59.

47. Light, Forever England, p. 11.

48. Mulhern, The moment of Scrutiny, p. 58.

49. Cardus, English cricket, p. 106.

50. Raymond Williams, The country and the city (Oxford, 1973), p. 35.

51. Cardus, A cricketer's book, p. 110.

52. Neville Cardus, Good days (London, 1934), p. 83.

53. Cardus, A cricketer's book, p. 32.

54. Cardus, Good days,p. 83.

55. Cardus, Good days,p. 83.

56. Cardus, English cricket, p. 77.

57. Cardus, Good days, p. 87.

58. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998), p. 141.

59. Cardus, Good days, p. 101.

60. Cardus, Good days, p. 83.

61. Cardus, Good days, p. 103.

62. Cardus, Good days, pp. 102–3.

63. Cardus, Good days, p. 103.

64. Neville Cardus, ‘Guilty, m'lud, to fiction if it serves higher truth’, The Guardian, 20 Oct. 1967.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony Bateman

Anthony Bateman, De Montfort University, Leicester