At least 2,000 babies were born to Black GIs stationed in Britain during the second world war and a home was created for some of them: Holnicote House in Somerset. Those who grew up there are now telling their stories
When Carol Edwards and her daughter went on a walking weekend to Holnicote House, a hotel on Exmoor in Somerset, a guide gave them a tour of the property, explaining the estate’s 500-year history. “The story ended at about 1945,” Edwards says. “So afterwards, I said to him: ‘You missed a section out.’” Edwards knew this because she had lived at Holnicote House for the first five years of her life, along with 25 other children like her, immediately after the second world war. All of the children were orphans, all were mixed race: their mothers were white British women, their fathers were African American GIs who had been stationed in Britain during the war.
Edwards was one of what US newspapers would call “brown babies”. At least 2,000 of these children were born during the war, at a time when there were just 7-10,000 Black people in the entire UK. So these “brown babies” increased the population of Black Britons by about 25 per cent. Over half are believed to have been given up for adoption, but Holnicote House, which was requisitioned by Somerset county council in 1943, was the only children’s home specifically dedicated to them. Edwards, 79, has positive memories of her time there. “They cared for us and they loved us all,” she says. “We were all treated the same and never made to feel different … I really do feel quite privileged to have spent my first five years there. I think I was one of the lucky ones.”
For the other “brown babies” the picture is more varied, says Dr Chamion Caballero, cofounder of the Mixed Museum, a digital archive of Britain’s history of racial mixing. They carried the double stigma of being mixed race and being born outside marriage, and they were treated as a problem by the authorities. “No one knew what to do with them,” she says. Most of them found themselves the only person of colour in very white rural areas, where they stood out, experienced discrimination and had no connection to Black communities. Those that did gravitate to Black communities in cities like London, Liverpool or Bristol also often faced discrimination for being “not Black enough”.