Cardus-The Shrewsbury Connection

We have produced seven books from the Archive’s now extensive resources, the latest of which is “Cardus: The Shrewsbury Connection” a limited edition of 100.

This brand new Cardus study is a heartfelt homage to Cardus and his time in Shrewsbury, and at Shrewsbury School especially, where he spent five summers as assistant cricket coach between 1912 and 1916 – hugely influential years for Cardus in terms of his development as man, writer, and even (it might be said) cricketer. His very presence there, transplanted from the mean streets of old Rusholme, had something of the miraculous about it – although Cardus himself had nudged matters in the right direction with an audacity bordering on recklessness, belying the shyness he often laid claim to.

Once settled there, Cardus thrived. He benefited from the patronage of a charismatic head (who also used him for secretarial duties and encouraged him in the use of the school library, facilitating Cardus’s personal programme of self-education) – as well as from his partnership with the senior cricket pro, Yorkshire and England all-rounder Ted Wainwright.

It was a time of bliss enjoyed within a great historic town and the verdant setting of the School playing fields. It was a place that stayed in the heart, a land of lost content that was nevertheless a stepping stone for Cardus into the world of the Manchester Guardian and into cricketing, musical, and literary history.

REVIEW

The latest volume in the splendid series from the Lancashire County Cricket Club archive covers the years between 1912 and 1916, which ‘Fred’ Cardus (as he then was) spent as assistant coach at Shrewsbury School.

It is hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between the grim industrial urban environment of Manchester round the turn of the last century and the affluence of Shrewsbury School – a couple of photos in the book underline the contrast – so it is unsurprising that the time Neville Cardus spent at Shrewsbury made a profound impression upon him. Indeed, Bob Hilton argues that it was this period that facilitated the transition from Fred to Neville. There is certainly more than a touch of Cardusian myth-making about the entire episode, not only the rather slender evidence that allowed him to make the application for the post, but also the fact that the senior professional who was his superior in his first two years there, Walter Attewell, was not – as he later maintained – the former Nottinghamshire and England professional, but a cousin of the same name.

Drawing on material from the Neville Cardus Archive, Bob Hilton examines Cardus’s time at Shrewsbury and how he made the most of very limited evidence to make himself not only a cricket professional but also a music critic. Archive material cited here includes photographs, letters, a programme for a lecture to the Shrewsbury School Musical Society, the first recorded appearance (in the Shrewsbury Chronicle in 1913) of the use of the name ‘Neville’, and some of Cardus’s own published work.

Over almost twenty years, the Neville Cardus Archive has delivered a series of nine publications of often unseen Cardus material, all of them nicely produced by Max Books with a scholarly but accessible approach. For the Cardus aficionado they are essential additions to the library.

Richard Lawrence

SOFTBACK COVER
Cardus: The Shrewsbury Connection” (37 pages and illustrated).
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