Peter Baines was a trailblazing black footballer who played for Wrexham, Oldham, Crewe and Hartlepool during the 1930s and 1940s. In one wartime season for Wrexham, the club later bought by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in 2021, he scored 27 goals in 35 games. He also played and scored for Liverpool in an exhibition match as a wartime guest player, and newspapers of the time described him as “a real go-ahead player” and “one of the best number eights in postwar combination football”. After Baines scored at Anfield, more than three decades passed before Howard Gayle, widely recognised as Liverpool’s first black player, made his debut. Gayle, who was offered and turned down an MBE in 2016, is celebrated for his career and work with Show Racism the Red Card. Baines holds a different place in history.
The central question surrounding Baines is whether he was the first Indigenous Australian to play football overseas. The mystery of Wrexham’s first black player has drawn increasing interest from writers and historians, yet his true origin has eluded all. Australian football writer Trevor Thompson first came across the tale more than 20 years ago, only a few years after Baines’s death. An article from 1944 in Hartlepool’s Northern Daily Mail caught his eye. It stated: “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.” But it was the second paragraph that buried the lead: “Peter is an Australian. 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 said.
Prof John Maynard from the University of Newcastle, a Worimi man and a prominent voice in Australian Indigenous history, believes such stories must be unearthed. “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,” he said.
Several sources point to Baines having Australian roots. Football journalist Nick Harris, in his 2003 book England, Their England: The Definitive Story of Foreign Footballers in the English Game Since 1888, described Baines as “the first Australian of Aboriginal descent in the League”, though he noted there was conjecture about his birthplace. Harris wrote: “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.” 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 the Australian football internet database OzFootball, Ancestry.com lists his birthplace as Australia (with unclear sources), and a brief social media post from a family member two years ago said they had traced Baines’s ancestry and discovered he was a “native Australian”.
However, Bill Hern, 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,” Hern wrote. On Baines’s racial background, Hern has been unable to settle the matter. His research has covered army records, birth and death certificates, news clippings and inquiries with Australian organisations. He has written thousands of words on Baines, who was also Crewe’s first black player. He cannot find evidence to support the suggestion Baines was taken from his Indigenous birth mother as part of the Stolen Generations. Nor can he find evidence of Baines’s father – also called Peter – being 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.”
Thompson remains optimistic that 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 said. A confirmed link would make Baines an important historical figure within 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,” Maynard said. In the absence of conclusive evidence, Thompson finds that line in the Hartlepool newspaper hard to shake. “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,” he said.
The scraps of newspapers mentioning Baines show that 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, at the age of 77, 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.