George Coulthard (1 August 1856 – 22 October 1883) was an Australian cricketer, umpire and Australian rules footballer.
Born and raised on a farm outside Melbourne, Victoria, Coulthard helped lead the Carlton Football Club to premiership success in the fledgling Victorian Football Association (VFA), and was a key member of the Victorian side that dominated the first intercolonial matches. A fast, versatile and highly skilled footballer, Coulthard was, in the opinion of many of his contemporaries, the greatest player yet seen in the Australian game. However, his football career ended in controversy in 1882 when he received a season-long suspension—then the most severe punishment ever handed down by the VFA—for brawling and using "bad language" during play. Regarded today as the game's "first bona fide superstar", he was an inaugural inductee into the Australian Football Hall of Fame.
As a professional cricketer, he played at club level for Melbourne, represented Victoria in five first-class intercolonial matches, and made one Test appearance for Australia, against England in 1882. Coulthard also umpired one of the earliest Tests at age 22, and although he remains the youngest-ever Test umpire, he is perhaps best known in cricket for instigating the sport's first international riot when, in 1879 in Sydney, he controversially gave New South Wales batsman Billy Murdoch out against Lord Harris's English XI. Coulthard was co-officiating the match with Edmund Barton, later the first prime minister of Australia.
Coulthard's sporting exploits made him a household name throughout Australia. Off the field, he ran a tobacco and sporting goods store in Lygon Street, Carlton, and won additional fame for surviving a shark attack off Shark Island, fighting bare-knuckle boxing champion Jem "The Gypsy" Mace, and being the alleged source of a dream premonition that convinced many Melbourne Cup punters to back a horse with long odds (the horse finished close to last). Coulthard is also known as Australian football's first "man in white" for umpiring an 1880 match in the now-traditional all-white uniform. In 1882, while serving as the England cricket team's umpire on its first quest to regain The Ashes, Coulthard became ill with tuberculosis, from which he died the following year, aged 27.
Coulthard is believed to have started his football career at Carlton District Football League side, North Cartlon. Coulthard then played for junior league football for Carlton Imperial in the 1874 season, where he remained in 1875 after the Imperials were elevated to Senior status. He proved to be a match-winner for the Imperials with his goal-kicking, and in 1876 was recruited by Carlton, then a powerhouse of Victorian football.
Starting off as one of Carlton's followers, he was described by The Footballer as a "rising and most promising player". Carlton topped the ladder that year and looked to win its fourth premiership in a row, but in a de facto premiership playoff against archrivals Melbourne, a controversial umpiring call secured the trophy for the latter club.
The Victorian Football Association (VFA) was established the following year, with Carlton as one of its twelve foundation member clubs. Despite switching between attacking and defensive positions during the 1877 VFA season, Coulthard still managed to rank equal-first on Carlton's goal-kicking tally with eight goals, and his elusive dashes with the ball in hand, fully 100 metres up the field at times, became a celebrated aspect of his game:
His speciality is, undoubtedly, running with the ball; many are the runs he has made, warding off his opponents with his long, muscular arms. This peculiar style of passing is really a treat to witness, and we may well say that Coulthard is unequalled at it, being a custom almost his own.
Mid-season, Carlton pioneered intercolonial football in Australia when it travelled north to Sydney in New South Wales to take on the Waratahs, a local rugby club, in two matches: one under rugby rules, the other under Australian rules. As was expected, each club won the match played by its own rules, and Coulthard was appraised as one of two Carlton footballers who adapted best to rugby. The clubs met again in Melbourne, repeating the code switch. Carlton won playing Australian rules and claimed a 1–1 draw in the rugby match in defiance of the opposing team's umpire, who disputed their goal; the Waratahs eventually allowed it under protest in order for the game to continue. Coulthard stood out in both fixtures and briefly joined the Waratahs to play rugby. He quickly dominated at the sport, scoring all five goals and four tries in his second and last game for the club.
Although he appeared in only two of the Waratahs' twelve rugby matches in 1877, Coulthard scored more goals than any other member that season, and tied equal first in tries. Coulthard was remembered decades later for "[showing] the Rugby men how their game should be played".
Following the matches against Carlton, the Waratahs adopted Australian rules, and for a time, the colonial game threatened to become the dominant code in Sydney. During this period, Coulthard accepted an invitation to travel to Sydney to help foster Australian rules. On 15 September 1877, soon after his arrival, Coulthard joined several local footballers on a fishing trip in Sydney Harbour. The group was anchored off Shark Island when Coulthard, sitting on the boat's gunwale with the back of his tailcoat hanging over the side, was pulled overboard by "a monster shark, 13 feet long". The shark had seized his coattails trailing on the water and dragged him beneath the surface "some ten or twelve feet" until it tore the coat from his body. After kicking at the shark, Coulthard swam to the surface alongside the boat, "into which he threw, with the aid of his friends, a kind of somersault, just about as quickly as he had been taken overboard." The incident was said to be "one of the most marvellous escapes from a fearful death on record" and "probably without parallel in Australian waters".
Shaken by the event, Coulthard returned to Melbourne within a week, where he resumed playing for Carlton. The club denied rumours that it had lured its star player back with financial incentives, stating that Coulthard returned due to a falling out with his associates in Sydney. Nonetheless, the shark entered sporting folklore in the 20th century as the reason why Coulthard abandoned his plans in Sydney, which, as the story goes, kept Australian rules from becoming the city's most popular football code.
Back in Victoria, in the lead-up to the final match of 1877, against Melbourne, Carlton was already acknowledged as having won the premiership—its fifth such honour in seven years—based on the results of previous encounters between the two clubs that season. Coulthard was instrumental in maintaining Carlton's supremacy and was voted by The Australasian in its end-of-season review as one of the VFA's best backline players. Carlton was considered the best side early on in the 1878 VFA season with Coulthard putting in best-on-ground efforts for the club. However, 1878 saw provincial Geelong develop a dynasty that would dominate the competition well into the 1880s. Coulthard capped off the season with 18 goals, the most of any player that year, and was singled out for his prowess in the ruck.
Coulthard was Carlton's best in its first match of the 1879 VFA season, a 4–0 win over Albert Park in which he scored a goal after using an innovative dodging tactic that, according to one observer, left his opponents "standing looking on at the cool operation like a lot of demented geese". In July, in Melbourne, Victoria defeated South Australia in the first football contest between two colonies. Coulthard contributed two goals for Victoria in a best-on-ground display, and again led the way when his colony trounced South Australia in the return match a few days later. At the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) the following month, in the first club football match staged at night under electric lights, Carlton triumphed over Melbourne 3–0, two of the goals coming from Coulthard. He ended 1879 with a record 21 goals, seven more than the runner-up. At the conclusion of the season, The Australasian declared: