[citation needed] Recruited from Warrnambool, Cordner played his first senior VFL match, aged 21, for Geelong, against Carlton, at Princes Park, on Saturday, 19 August 1911 (round sixteen).

He was given the single game to gauge his prospects for the 1912 season; he played well for Geelong in a high standard match, which Carlton won in the last quarter.

[citation needed] His brother, Sergeant Edward Clement Cordner (Service number 89), enlisted on 18 May 1914, serving in the 13th Light Horse Regiment.

[12] His other cousin, Dr. Henry "Harry" Cordner, overseas at the time that war broke out, was commissioned as an officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and served in France.

[13] Cordner died on 25 April 1915, shot some four miles inland, after being cut off by the Turks and becoming separated from his Battalion at Cape Helles, the rocky headland at the southwesternmost tip of the Gallipoli peninsula.

[16][17] In an apparent act of kindness, the final declaration of his death was conveyed to his mother and father by the Reverend Thomas Pearse Bennett, the vicar of Christ Church, Warrnambool.