George Bulmer’s soccer career in Australia appears fleeting. He played a handful of games for the club which started as Returned Soldiers in 1920 and merged with the existing Brisbane City the next year. As the name suggests, Returned Soldier’s contained many who played in Brisbane before the war.
Bulmer, though, is one of several Returned Soldiers’ players who were not reported as playing before the war. This is perhaps due newspapers rarely printing line-ups of the 60-odd teams which played in Brisbane in 1914. (To complicate matters, an F. Bulmer was listed for Merthyr Thistle in 1919, as Queensland soccer made its first tentative steps to restart competitive senior football after the war. It is unknown if this is a relative.)
Bulmer arrived in Queensland in April 1913 having been born in South Shields, Durham. He was a plasterer before the war, which led to his name appearing on the Operative Plasterers’ Association Honour Board in 1917. He enlisted in Brisbane in December 1915. Otherwise not much is known. His record merely states that he arrived in France September 1916, joined the 1st Pioneer Battalion a month later and left England to return home in June 1919, where he disembarked in Darwin.
Bulmer married Estella McMahon in 1921. He died in Brisbane in 1958.