life". He was devastated by her death from cancer in October 1953; the following year he edited and contributed to a memorial volume of tributes. For The Manchester Guardian, Cardus wrote around 30 music articles a year. These included "survey" pieces, which often reflected his personal enthusiasms; a regular subject was the music of Gustav Mahler, who in the early 1950s was by no means a popular composer with British audiences. Cardus sought to change that, with a series of articles between 1952 and 1957 under titles such as "Mahler's Growing Influence", "Misunderstanding Mahler", and "The Mahler Problem". He wrote the first volume of a detailed analysis entitled Gustav Mahler: His Mind and his Music; the book, dealing with Mahler's first five symphonies, was published in 1965, but was poorly received by critics. Volume II was never written. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Cardus wrote cricket articles; these included an annual reflection for Wisden Cricketers' Almanack and occasional columns for The Manchester Guardian, for whom he covered the 1953 Test Matches against Australia. In the English winter of 1954–55 Cardus made his final visit to Australia, to report on the Test series for The Sydney Morning Herald; he undertook to write "impressions" rather than day-to-day reports on play. He found time to enjoy Sydney's theatrical and music scene, but was disappointed in what he perceived as a decline in the city's musical standards. In the decades after the war many of Cardus's earlier heroes and acquaintances died. On Fry's death in 1956 Cardus wrote of him as "A great Englishman, measured by any standards of occupation, art and civilisation". In 1959, still in harness, Newman died at the age of 90; Cardus considered him the most outstanding of all music critics, and thought he should have been appointed a Companion of Honour (CH), or even to the Order of Merit. Beecham died on 8 March 1961. Cardus had for some years noted a decline in his old friend's powers, though he had written in 1954, on the occasion of Beecham's 75th birthday, of the debt the music world owed to the conductor: "He led us out of the Teutonic captivity. He showed us other and more sensitive worlds". After Beecham's death, Cardus organised the publication of a celebratory memoir, as he had done with Kathleen Ferrier. To an extent the departed idols were replaced with new heroes: in music, Herbert