Cricket's Historians

114 Differences in Style Evolutions’, which begins with the 1744 Laws, but soon after states: ‘I do not propose in this book to go all the way into the origins of cricket. Mr Altham and ‘H.P.-T.’ have attended once and for all (in our time) to the archaeology. If you tell me that the game was evolved (or was not evolved) from Club-ball, Creag, Cat and Dog, or Stob-ball, I am not more intrigued than I am when somebody tells me (while I am listening to Schubert) that the art of song was probably born when primitive man first bayed the moon with a howl and thus intensified speech by emotion.’ So Cardus made clear that he left the researches into early cricket to others, but he, himself, was responsible for one historical notion, that the Edwardian era was the ‘Golden Age of Cricket’. In this small respect, Cardus influenced the perception of the game’s history for future generations. Most adults consider that the cricket they watched as a schoolboy or schoolgirl was the ‘Golden Age’. Cardus was no exception; it was simply that he had the ability to write fluently of his own childhood memories of county cricket at Old Trafford and the players that performed on that famous ground in the early years of the 20 th century. John Frederick Neville (he later added his mother’s maiden name ‘Cardus’) was born in Manchester in 1889. He was engaged at Shrewsbury School as assistant cricket coach in 1912 and on the outbreak of war added to his duties that of secretary to the headmaster, Dr Cyril Alingham. He left this post when Alingham moved to Eton, in 1916. The following year he joined the staff of the Manchester Guardian ; his cricket reports for that paper commenced in 1919. Between 1940 and 1947 he lived in Australia, but in 1945 English Cricket was published by Collins. This is a 48 page gentle introduction to the bones of cricket in England by Cardus; it does not delve further than the Kent v England match of 1744, but does contain reproductions of some early cricket illustrations. Following his return to England Cardus wrote two volumes of autobiography, which are largely as romantic as his other writings. He died in London in February 1975. A final passing note regarding Cardus. The Introduction to his 1930