How Britain’s ‘brown babies’ were hidden away: the secret history of the first mixed race orphanage

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 ”.

Most of them were the only person of colour in very white areas, or if they moved to urban Black communities, they were ‘not Black enough’

After the US joined the war in 1942, two to three million GIs passed through Britain, an estimated 840,000 of whom were Black. It was a culture clash on several fronts. This was still the pre-civil rights, Jim Crow era and the US military was segregated. Black soldiers were mostly assigned noncombat roles such as ground support, catering, cleaning, driving and construction – it was substantially Black labour that built the 200-odd US bases around the UK, which were largely in rural areas: East Anglia, the south-west, the south coast and south Wales.

It wasn’t just the American forces’ living arrangements and work that were segregated; so was their leisure, explains Lucy Bland, professor of social and cultural history at Anglia Ruskin university and author of Britain’s “Brown Babies” : “Towns or villages would be designated ‘Black’ for certain days and ‘white’ for others.” Thus, pockets of Britain had American segregation foisted upon them – which grated with many who considered themselves allied in the fight against fascism.

Many local people preferred the company of the Black GIs to the white ones, according to Caballero. “The white British often found the white Americans to be quite arrogant,” she says. “Whereas they found that the Black soldiers were very friendly; they were very polite, they were very warm, they didn’t look down on people. But attitudes did start to shift a little bit once children started to be born. So it was that whole thing of: ‘Great to be friends, great to be allies. Don’t necessarily want you as a son-in-law.’”

Ann Evans, who also lived at Holnicote, says her mum worked in a bar in Castle Cary: “That’s where she met my father.” Evans’ father was from Mississippi. He was unmarried, and planned on returning to study accountancy after the war. He had become a regular at her mother’s pub on those “Black” nights. “They had a party the last night before D-day, and that’s how they got together.”

Edwards’ father was a sergeant from Detroit, stationed in Somerset. Her mother was married and already had five children; her husband was away fighting in Italy (and apparently never found out about Edwards). Both women were given up for adoption within days of their births and sent to Holnicote. There was often little alternative. The fathers, if they even knew they were fathers, were returning to a US where interracial marriage was still illegal in 30 states. Even if they did want to stay, they could only marry with the permission of their (invariably white) commanding officer, which was usually denied. One British mother who did marry her Black partner in a southern state was deported and her husband imprisoned, says Bland.

These women, from close-knit rural communities, faced enormous pressure to give up their children for adoption. In families that did keep their mixed-race child, it was often the grandmother who raised them, to avoid stigmatising the mothers or jeopardising their chances of marriage. “The women who kept their children had a very difficult time,” says Bland. “They were spat at in the street. They had difficulty getting work.” Of course, there were many children of white GIs born in the same way, but they were easier to conceal.

Holnicote encouraged local families to adopt these children, which is what happened to Evans. “My mother was desperate for a girl, because she had all boys,” she says. Overnight, Evans relocated to Abertillery, in south Wales (she speaks with a soft Welsh accent), where she gained a whole family network: parents, grandparents and four brothers. Her mother’s father had cautioned against adopting a mixed-race child, but her mother didn’t care, says Evans. “I don’t think she realised other people’s reactions at that time, in the early 50s, because when they saw me, and mum said I was her daughter, they naturally assumed she had gone with a Black man. She wasn’t a lady that would have cheated on her husband.”

Evans remembers a vague sense of being “different”. “As soon as I came into the valleys, I was pointed out quite bluntly, and I was told to go back where I came from. And this was from adults, not children.” She assumed they meant Somerset. “I had this Somerset accent at the time, and half the time I couldn’t understand what people were saying to me because it was very thick Welsh accents up in the valley. I used to look at them rather stupidly.” Her parents and her brothers always stuck up for her, though, she says.

Edwards transferred to a children’s home near Taunton with another boy from Holnicote, where they lived from ages five to 12. “We were the only mixed race children there, but we weren’t made to feel any different from the other children,” she says. Her father had written to the home and tried to bring her to the US to live with his new family, but the authorities decided she would be better off where she was, she says. “He tried very hard, but in the end, he just gave up.”

Sandy looked in a mirror when she was 14, suddenly saw she was Black and said to her friends: ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

She moved to another home in Buckinghamshire, and was adopted aged 14 by a “kind and wonderful” couple who lived near High Wycombe and had a grownup son with children of his own. Like Evans, she felt plugged into a loving family network; but again, she was the only Black person in her school. When children asked where she was from, she couldn’t really answer them.

None of the Holnicote children knew much about their backgrounds. “We had no idea at all why we were there or what our future had in store for us,” says Edwards. This was common, says Bland. “There was one, Sandy, who was in a children’s home in Bristol, and she looked in a mirror – she’s 14 – and she suddenly sees she’s Black. And she says to her friends: ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’”

“I discovered who I was through music,” says Edwards. “I know it sounds silly, but I was into singers like Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, Nina Simone, Shirley Bassey. And it wasn’t until I discovered they were Black that I realised: ‘I’m like them.’” Edwards’ parents didn’t tell her she was adopted until her wedding day, aged 18, when they handed her her adoption papers and said: “‘Now you’re married, these are your property.’ My mother said: ‘The day I give you these will be the day you don’t want to call me mum any more.’ And I said: ‘Well, that will never happen.’ So she took the papers back, and I never saw them from that day to this.”

Evans waited until her late 30s, when her parents had died, to start looking for her biological mother. Social services told her: “We have found your mother, but she doesn’t want anything to do with you.” When she died, Evans approached her mother’s daughter, Evans’ half-sister, who knew nothing of her existence. They talked and she realised that her biological mother was “apparently not a very nice lady. And she wasn’t very nice to my [half] sister. Eventually I had a better life than she had.” Her father, she discovered, had died aged 49. He had married and they had an adopted son. His widow refused to meet Evans. “She said: ‘What makes you think I want to meet my husband’s indiscretions?’ And I said: ‘Curiosity?’” She did at least send Evans a photograph of him.

Edwards never found her biological mother and continues to seek information on her (she lived in South Cadbury, Somerset, and her surname was Conners). She did travel to Florida to meet her father when she was in her mid 30s. “It was quite awkward for me,” she recalls, “because we were surrounded by family members, and I would have preferred to have had a few moments with him on my own.”

Both women married and have children and grandchildren of their own, and both are now in touch with their American families, and with other former Holnicote residents. “What we’re increasingly seeing is it’s the children and their grandchildren who are exploring the family history,” says Caballero, “and often supporting their parent or grandparent and encouraging them, because of the secrecy and shame that the history is surrounded in.”

DNA testing has been a great asset in these quests, Caballero says. As has GI Trace , a volunteer group dedicated to helping descendants of American GIs (of all races) to find their relatives. The Mixed Museum is another resource. The threads of a lost history are being tied back together. Edwards and Evans recently returned to Holnicote House to record a podcast for the National Trust (which owns and manages the Holnicote estate ), along with Bland and the historian David Olusoga. “I always get a bit emotional,” says Edwards, “because the memories are so strong, and they were such beautiful times.” Evans agrees: “It was like going home. Because although I’ve lived in Abertillery all these years, I have never felt as if it was my home. I always felt like the odd person out.”

After Edwards’ tour, she pointed out to the new owner of the hotel that there were no photographs or references to Holnicote House’s history as Britain’s first mixed race orphanage. “She said she would arrange to get photos up on the wall and it would become part of the history of the house, which is nice.”

• The National Trust Podcast episode WWII ‘Brown Babies’: A Hidden History is available now