Dudley Carew

Who was Dudley Carew?

Dudley Charles Carew was an English journalist, writer, poet and film critic. He was a special correspondent of The Times in the 1920s and 1930s, and reported on cricket matches for the paper. From 1945 until his retirement in 1963 he was the paper's film critic. Almost all his articles for The Times were written anonymously, as was the paper's policy until William Rees-Mogg became its editor in 1967.

John Arlott wrote of him: It was, perhaps, unfortunate for Dudley Carew that his entry into cricket writing should have coincided with the rise of Neville Cardus. If there had never been a Cardus, how highly should we have ranked one who wrote: "At the other end Gunn batted much as a man potters about a garden, digging his fork into a bed with an abstracted and absent-minded air..."

Arlott also rated highly his cricket novel, Son of Grief, saying: It has its darknesses, but it is convincing, and its characters are rounded and credible. The title, as with those of his other cricket books, was taken from the poetry of A. E. Housman. Housman's A Shropshire Lad contains the lines: Now in Maytime to the wicket Out I march with bat and pad: See the son of grief at cricket Trying to be glad.