Peter Baines: Wrexham's trailblazing black footballer and the enduring mystery of football's first Indigenous Australian pioneer
The story has all the ingredients of a Hollywood blockbuster — right down to Marvel star Ryan Reynolds — yet its confounding ending is more befitting an indie production. Its protagonist is Peter Baines, a trailblazer as a black footballer and, some insist, the first Indigenous Australian to play the game overseas. Or was he?
Wrexham are recognised internationally these days, having enjoyed an improbable recent rise through the English Football League under Reynolds and co-owner Rob McElhenney, who bought the club in 2021. The mystery of the Welsh club's first black player has likewise drawn increasing interest from writers and historians — and yet his true origin has eluded them all.
A wartime pioneer at the Racecourse
Long before Disney arrived at the Racecourse Ground, Baines was a legitimate footballing pioneer. Playing through the 1930s and 1940s for clubs including Wrexham, Oldham, Crewe and Hartlepool — he was also Crewe's first black player — he scored 27 goals in 35 games in one wartime season for the Red Dragons. He was a legitimate guest star, too: Baines also played and scored for Liverpool in an exhibition match as a wartime guest player.
The newspapers of the time were gushing. Baines was described as "a real go-ahead player" and "one of the best number eights in postwar combination football". Remarkably, after Baines scored at Anfield, it would be more than three decades until Howard Gayle, widely recognised as Liverpool's first black player, made his debut. Gayle is celebrated both for his playing career and his work with Show Racism the Red Card, and in 2016 he was offered — and turned down — an MBE.
Baines has a very different place in history. The man the newspapers of the era called Peter "Darkie" Baines died almost 30 years ago in Manchester at the age of 77, and the truth of where he came from remains hotly contested.
The clue buried in a Hartlepool newspaper
Australian football writer Trevor Thompson first came across the tale of Baines more than 20 years ago, barely a few years after the former player's death. An article from 1944 in Hartlepool's Northern Daily Mail caught the eye of Thompson, a longtime journalist from Sydney.
"In the last few games no player gave more whole-hearted service to Hartlepools United than Peter Baines, who scored three of Saturday's six goals against Gateshead," the article states. But it had buried the lede. "Peter is an Australian," the second paragraph begins. "As a boy he came with his parents to Liverpool …"
Thompson still wonders about that line. "Why would anybody bother saying that if it wasn't the case? That lingers in my head," he says.
"There's so many of these missing histories," says Prof John Maynard of the University of Newcastle, a Worimi man and a prominent voice in Australian Indigenous history. "These stories need to be unearthed and revealed because I've always said Aboriginal history is like a giant jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces not on the table."
The case for an Australian-born pioneer
To some, Baines's Australian-ness is taken for granted. Football journalist Nick Harris wrote of Baines in his 2003 book, England, Their England: The Definitive Story of Foreign Footballers in the English Game Since 1888, describing him as "the first Australian of Aboriginal descent in the League", even while noting there was conjecture about his birthplace.
"Some sources claim he was born in Manchester, where he was raised in an orphanage. But it seems he was quite possibly born in Australia and only later transported to the orphanage as a result of the repugnant [forced assimilation] policy," Harris wrote.
A Daily Mail article three years ago claimed Baines was Australian and that he "almost certainly didn't travel to the other side of the world by choice". His playing career is included on Australian football database OzFootball. Ancestry.com lists Baines's birthplace as Australia, although its sources are unclear, and a brief post from a family member on social media two years ago said they had traced Baines's ancestry and discovered he was a "native Australian".
A confirmed link would make Baines an important historical figure in the chronology of Indigenous Australia, according to Maynard. "As far as Aboriginal participation in sport, we had cricketers and jockeys and athletes in the later 19th century, but then a lot tighter control came over Aboriginal people's lives and their participation in sport was cut off basically through the colour bar," he says.
The sceptic's case: a Manchester birth record
Bill Hern, the author of Football's Black Pioneers, is not persuaded. He has found a Manchester birth record of a Cecil Peter Baines, whose date of death matches that of the former footballer. "I have to say that I am 99% certain that Baines never set foot in Australia but I'll leave you to make your own judgement," he writes via email.
On Baines's racial background, however, Hern has been unable to settle the question. His research has covered army records, birth and death certificates, news clippings and inquiries with Australian organisations — thousands of words in total. He cannot find evidence to support the suggestion that Baines was taken from his Indigenous birth mother as part of the Stolen Generations. Nor can he find evidence that Baines's father, also called Peter, was black.
"The nearest suggestion is a reference on the Habitual Criminals' Register to him being 'swarthy'," Hern wrote. "More significantly, when Peter senior was on the run after escaping from prison his very detailed description did not include any reference to him being dark-skinned. Nor is there anything to suggest that Peter junior's mother Alice was black."
A breakthrough in sight?
Clarifying Baines's connection to Australia remains a goal for many, and Thompson is optimistic he is close to a breakthrough through tracing family links and unsealed church records.
"The idea that there could be an Indigenous Australian professional player in that era makes them unique and certainly the first," he says. "Even though we're not able to prove definitively, or haven't been able to so far, that he's born in Australia, or that he's got any connection with Australia, it intrigues me that somebody might say that anyway."
In the absence of conclusive evidence, that single line in the Hartlepool newspaper — "Peter is an Australian …" — remains hard to shake.
A life remembered with affection
According to the scraps of newspapers mentioning Baines, it is clear his life was not without pain. There are clippings of court appearances and references to his alcohol and gambling habits. Yet on his death in 1997 there was an outpouring of affection.
One letter said his "smiling face" would be remembered by those in Manchester, where he lived in his later years. Another described Baines as a "smashing story-teller and could laugh at himself". All recalled him as a very good footballer — whatever the truth of where his remarkable story truly began.