Wrexham did not feature in our book, Football’s Black Pioneers, for the simple reason that they were not in the Football League when we went to print in 2020. That all changed on 22nd April 2023 when they secured their position at the top of the National League after a tense, season-long, ‘to the wire’ tussle with Notts County. Wrexham guaranteed top spot by beating play-off contenders, Boreham Wood, in the penultimate game of the season.
Someone should make a film about Wrexham’s resurgence in recent years – oh, wait, someone already has! Welcome to Wrexham tells the story through the eyes of Hollywood A-listers, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, and is available to watch on the Disney+ channel in the UK, the channel seems appropriate given the fairy tale nature of the story. Wrexham almost went out of business in 2011 when they faced a winding-up order from HMRC over unpaid taxes. Hundreds of fans converged on the club’s Racecourse ground and the £100,000 needed to save the club was raised in just seven hours. A supporters’ trust was set up and they remained in control until Reynolds and McElhenney took over the reins in 2021.
We are happy to welcome Wrexham back!
But the business of this site is to celebrate and commemorate the first black player at clubs, so who was Wrexham’s?
Peter Baines was a ‘character’, he came from a long line of ‘characters’ and it was very much a case of ‘like father, like son’. Researcher, Bill Hern, found several entries for Cecil Peter Baines (almost certainly the footballer’s father) in the Habitual Criminals Register, the first in 1909 when he was not yet a teenager. He was on the wrong side of the law on many subsequent occasions. In his defence we should mention that during the First World War he signed up with the Kings’s Liverpool Regiment and was at the Battle of Loos in 1915. His son, Peter, the footballer, followed in his father’s criminal footsteps and also by joining the Army during the Second World War. Army discipline might perhaps have saved Peter Baines Jnr from a life of crime – it didn’t! Indeed, there are a number of offences on his Army record and he was eventually court martialled in November 1945.
All of this and much more is detailed in the Crewe Alexandra chapter of our book, Football’s Black Pioneers[1]In addition to Wrexham, Peter Baines played for several clubs and you can find out more about his career, which can hardly be described as ‘stellar’, in Football’s Black Pioneers. What interests us here is his short spell with Wrexham for whom he played six games, scoring twice wearing the No.11 shirt, in the 1946/47 season. The chances of us securing a programme for one of the games he played in are slim. But we will keep looking out for:
Rochdale vs Wrexham, 3rd September 1946
Wrexham vs Carlisle, 14th September 1946
Chester vs Wrexham, 18th September 1946
Accrington Stanley vs Wrexham, 21st September 1946
Wrexham vs Rochdale, 25th September 1946 and
Bradford City vs Wrexham, 5th October 1946.
While we wait we have decided to feature Wrexham’s second black player, Steve Stacey.
Steve was the son of a black American Air Force man who was stationed near Bristol during World War Two. Steve was what was known at the time as a ‘brown baby'[2]There is a book with that title by Lucy Bland. It is upsetting and uplifting in equal measure.. He signed for Bristol City as a sixteen year old in November 1961 and it was February 1966 when he joined Wrexham, in the intervening period he had made precisely zero first team appearances for City. He was happy enough at Bristol (it was his home town) but didn’t want to play in the reserves all his life, he was getting itchy feet and craved first team football. Wrexham, a division below City, offered him that.
Steve made his debut in an away game against Southport on 26th February 1966, as is often the way, his name does not appear in the programme. He does not feature on the team sheet nor is he one of the twenty players honoured with a very brief pen picture – hardly surprising as he had only signed a couple of days earlier and was meeting his new team mates for the first time on the day of the game.
Steve was a versatile player, he wore the No.2 shirt on his debut but over the course of the rest of the season he would wear Nos.3, 4, 6 and 8. In his career during which he appeared in the League for six clubs, he played in every position, including in goal – we doubt any other professional could make a similar claim. On a personal level Steve’s first season with Wrexham was a success, he played fifteen games and chipped in with a goal (in a 2-2 draw at home to Halifax). It was less successful for the team. Although Steve collected two win bonuses during March it was all down hill after that and a succession of losses with a smattering of draws saw Wrexham finish bottom, 92nd in the Football League out of 92. In those days the bottom four clubs had to throw themselves on the mercy of the other clubs and apply for re-election, usually such applications were successful (the people doing the voting knew it might be their turn next season – there but for the grace of God…) and Wrexham were indeed granted a reprieve.
Things improved after that (they could hardly have got worse) and Wrexham finished 7th and 8th at the end of the two full seasons Steve played for them. He was an ever present in 1966/67 (scoring two goals) and made a total of forty appearances in the 1967/68 season (scoring three goals during this campaign). He enjoyed his time with Wrexham and was sad to leave but when 1st division Ipswich Town came knocking in September 1968 he would have been mad to turn down the chance. You can follow the next chapter in his story by going to the Ipswich Town programme page.
Better still you can check him out in our book, Football’s Black Pioneers, where he appears three times as the first black player at Charlton Athletic, Exeter City and Ipswich Town. During our research for the book we read plenty of footballer’s auto-biographies and Steve’s, The Colour of Football, was one of the best and we can recommend it.
References