Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article may contain the image and name of an Indigenous Australian who has died.

The story has the ingredients of a Hollywood blockbuster, including Marvel star Ryan Reynolds, with a confounding ending more befitting an indie production. Its protagonist is Peter Baines, a trailblazer as a black footballer and the first Indigenous Australian to play football overseas. Or was he?

Wrexham are recognised internationally having enjoyed an improbable recent rise through the English Football League. The mystery of the club’s first black player has likewise drawn increasing interest by writers and historians. Yet his true origin has eluded all.

Playing in the 1930s and 1940s for clubs including Wrexham, Oldham, Crewe and Hartlepool, Baines scored 27 goals in 35 games in one wartime season for the Red Dragons, the club bought by Reynolds and co-owner Rob McElhenney in 2021.

Long before Disney’s plotlines at the Racecourse Ground, Baines was a legitimate footballing pioneer who also played and scored for Liverpool in an exhibition match as a wartime guest player. The newspapers of the time were gushing. Baines was “a real go-ahead player” and “one of the best number eights in postwar combination football”.

After Bainesscored 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 for his playing career and work with Show Racism the Red Card, and was offered, and turned down, an MBE in 2016. Baines has a different place in history.

The man newspapers called Peter “Darkie” Baines died almost 30 years ago in Manchester at age 77. 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 lead. “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.”

“There’s so many of these missing histories,” says Prof John Maynard from 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.”

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. In it, he described Baines as “the first Australian of Aboriginal descent in the League”, even if he noted 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.

An article in the Daily Mail three years ago claimed Baines was Australian, and that he “almost certainly didn’t travel to the other side of the world by choice”. Baines’s playing career is included on Australian football internet 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”.

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. His research has covered army records, birth and death certificates, news clippings and inquiries with Australia 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’,” he 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.”

Clarifying Baines’ connection to Australia remains a goal for many. 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.

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.”

In the absence of conclusive evidence, Thompson finds that line in the Hartlepool newspaper – “Peter is an Australian …” – 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.”

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.