George Coulthard, born August 1, 1856, was an early colossus of Australian Rules Football, a talented cricketer and a versatile man of many talents who attracted career threatening controversies and life threatening sharks with equal elan. In this series Pradip Dhole sketches the extraordinarily interesting life of this extraordinarily interesting man.

Click to Read Part 1

The Versatile Sportsman

George Coulthard was an instinctive sportsman by nature and excelled on many playing arenas. A small item in The Daily News (Perth) of Saturday, July 13, 1929 gives us some idea of his prowess in multifarious sports, as follows: “Coulthard, in the opinion of many veterans of the game, was the greatest exponent of the Australian code. Both by his prowess as a player, and by the great personal influence he exercised, Coulthard did much to place the game in the solid position it occupies today… Those who had the opportunity of seeing Coulthard and the other champions in action would unhesitatingly award the distinction to Coulthard of being ‘the daddy of them all.’”

The above report continues as follows: “This great player was justly entitled to be ranked as one of the finest all-round sportsmen of all time. He enjoyed boxing and was often seen in contests with the marvellous Jem Mace, the then champion of the world. He was a prominent cricketer, coached cricketers, and was a leading player of the Melbourne CC. He was later an inter-state cricket umpire, and took an interest and was a participant in other forms of sport.” He was to also have a surreal connection with horse-racing later in his life.

Cricket in New Zealand received a great boost as a result of the Gold Rush of the early 1860s, when an entrepreneur from the South Island city of Dunedin named Shadrach Jones invited the All England cricket team touring Australia under George Parr in the 1863/64 Australian summer to play a few games in Canterbury and Otago in January, 1864. According to Te Ara, The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, this visit by Parr’s Englishmen was “the first international contact for New Zealand sport, and in New Zealand it pioneered the idea of an enclosed ground to which spectators could be charged admission.”

It seems that “Athletics, cricket and horse racing in particular took root in the new goldfields towns, and cricket thrived with financial backing from publicans eager to attract clientele to their establishments.”

The middle-class English culture soon began to influence sport in New Zealand, with new sporting clubs being formed with proper facilities both for the players as well as for the spectators. These clubs began to institute rigid regulations with respect to dress and deportment in keeping with the Public School traditions of England.

With great strides being made in the improvement of the internal transport systems of New Zealand in the 1870s with respect to shipping, the railways and the telegraphic communication systems, sport spread rapidly through the island nation. Regional Cricket Associations were formed in Wellington (1875), Otago (1876), and in Canterbury (1877). As mentioned above, George Parr’s Englishmen of 1863/64 formed the first international sporting team to visit New Zealand, followed shortly by another English team under James Lillywhite in the Antipodean summer of 1876/77.

The first sporting team from New Zealand to make an overseas tour was undertaken by a cricket team from Canterbury that toured Australia in between Dec/1878 and Jan/1879 to play 6 second-class games in Victoria and 1 game at Hobart. The highlight of the tour was the game against the Melbourne Cricket Club, played at Melbourne Cricket Ground on 4th and 5th Jan/1879. This brings into present focus the cricket career of George Coulthard.

Coulthard the cricketer

The early part of Coulthard’s cricket career was spent under the auspices of the Carlton Cricket Club, from where he had moved on to the Melbourne Cricket Club in the summer of 1878/79, in his 23rd year, in the capacity of a professional net bowler, whose brief was to bowl to the Club members when they felt inclined to practise their batting skills in the nets.

A right-hand batsman and right-arm medium paced bowler, Coulthard’s first chronicled appearance in a cricket match appears to have been as a substitute fielder in the game between XV of Victoria and the returning Australian team that had toured England in the 1878 English summer. The game in question was played over 12th, 13th, 14th, and 16th of December, 1878. At the end of the report about the 4th day’s play at the MCG in The Argus (Melbourne) of Dec 17, 1878, one finds this nugget of information: “For the Fifteen, the fieldsmen who displayed most efficiency were Major, Coulthard (substitute for Groube), Moule, Gaggin, and Tennet.”

Playing his first game for the Club, against the touring Canterbury team at the MCG on 4th and 5th January 1879, Coulthard made a modest beginning to his senior cricket career, batting at # 10 in both innings and scoring 1 and 3. He did not bowl in either innings as the Club won the game by 168 runs. Interestingly, batting at # 9 in both innings for the Club was one Patrick George McShane, better known as George McShane, a man who would later become the co-holder of a very rare honour along with George Coulthard.

The game was dominated in no uncertain terms by a member of the Club called George Alexander, who opened the batting in both innings, scoring 77 and 6, and capturing 9/50 in the Canterbury 2nd innings total of 123 all out. mentioned above, played under the colours of the Melbourne CC against the touring Canterbury team at the MCG in the first week of Jan/1879. This was to be the first of only 5 second-class games that Coulthard was to play in his relatively short career.

Lord Harris and his men

The next phase in the senior cricketing experience of George Coulthard was to be intimately linked with an incident that had unfolded at Southampton on Oct 17, 1878 when the P & O ship Australia had set sail with 10 of the 13 selected players of the English cricket team under Lord Harris (the other three members were to join the team later at Suez) that was about to undertake the chronologically second Test-playing tour of Australia by an English team.

It should be mentioned here in parenthesis that Lord Harris had not been the first choice to lead the 1878/79 English team to Australia. When Mr. Curtis Reid, the then Secretary of the Melbourne Cricket Club, had written to the English cricket establishment in the spring of 1878 with the premise that a team of English amateur cricketers would be welcome if they were to tour Australia in the Australian summer of 1878/79, adding that the tourists may consider bringing two professional cricketers to bolster their bowling attack, the initial positive response had come from the famous Middlesex Walker family of 8 first-class cricketers, including 7 cricket playing brothers and a cricketing uncle.

The Walkers had been ready to assume the responsibility of selecting the touring party and of making the arrangements for the tour. Isaac Donnithorne Walker, the youngest member of the cricketing Walker brotherhood, was to have been the skipper of the proposed team. After the preliminary selection of players had been made however, one of the siblings, Arthur Henry, passed away on 4 October/1878. The Walkers therefore felt obliged to dissociate themselves from the tour, and George Robert Canning Harris, the 4th Baron Harris of Kent, with his past experience of touring North America in 1872, was prevailed upon to assume the responsibility of leading the England squad for the proposed 1878/79 tour of Australia.

The whole party of 13 English cricketers had then boarded the mail ship Assam at Suez and had sailed east, arriving at Adelaide Bay on 3 Dec/1878. A coach had then conveyed the visiting cricketers to Adelaide where they had regained their land legs and indulged in assiduous practice for about 10 days before moving on with the actual cricket of the tour. From Adelaide, the English party had rolled on to Melbourne, then to Tasmania, before reaching New South Wales. By the time they were in Sydney in the 3rd week of January, 1879, the Englishmen had played 5 games with varied degrees of success.

The appointment of Coulthard

It was at Melbourne that the suggestion was first mooted of appointing George Coulthard, who had been under employment for the previous two seasons as a net bowler of the Melbourne Cricket Club, as the travelling umpire attached to the English camp. A reasonable man, Lord Harris had been amenable to the suggestion and had decided to put the 23-year old Coulthard on trial as one of the umpires for the Boxing Day game between XV of Victoria and the Englishmen at the MCG.

Here is the corroboration of the above-mentioned arrangement, in the words of Lord Harris himself, in a letter to Mr VE Walker that had appeared in The Mercury (Hobart) of June 12, 1879: “As you know, we brought no umpire, and on our arrival at Adelaide I asked the representatives of the Melbourne CC if they could recommend anyone to us whom we could take with us throughout the tour. They mentioned Coulthard, professional on their ground, whom they had constantly tried and found competent, and added that if we, on trial found competent, the MCC would be very glad to give him leave of absence so long as we wanted his services. I considered him on trial a good and trustworthy umpire, and arranged that he should accompany us …”

The documented scorecard of Boxing Day game mentioned above, which began on the Thursday of the Christmas week, does not, unfortunately, display the names of the umpires for the drawn 3-day game, the first played by the Englishmen in Victoria. A match report carried by The Argus (Melbourne) of Friday, Dec 27, 1878, however, ends with the information: “The umpires were – Mr. Coulthard for the Englishmen and Mr. J Smith for the Victorians. Mr. Plummer scored for the Eleven and Mr. Marshall for the Fifteen.”