Abstract
During the period 1942–1945, around one million US servicemen were based in England as part of the preparations for the invasion of Europe, around 13% of whom were African American. This presence created a number of tensions relating to the racially segregated army and fears about miscegenation and the likelihood of ‘half caste’ children. The response of the government to their arrival was delayed, uncoordinated and equivocal. Friendships and unions with white British women resulted in the birth of around 1200–1700 ‘brown babies’, whose fortunes were shaped by racial prejudice, the prohibition of mixed marriages in many US states, and the half-hearted engagement with the issue by the British government. It was largely left to voluntary organisations and well-meaning individuals to make provision.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter draws on two major archival collections: (1) MH 55/1656. Homes for ‘coloured’ children (1944–1948). The National Archives, Kew. (2) Records of Military Agencies Relating to African Americans (multiple documents), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Extracted and photocopied by Stacian Gorden at Modern Military Records Department, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, USA.
- 2.
Janet Baker, The Children They Left Behind, 1996. Accessed at: http://lestweforget.hamptonu.edu/page.cfm?uuid=9FEC4352-FCC8-C499-64C306903814BD7A
- 3.
Likewise, there were no surveys in France, Italy and other countries where black servicemen were based. However, commentators reported estimates of 30,000–50,000 illegitimate births fathered by American servicemen in Germany, 1000–4000 in Japan, and 2000–4000 in the Philippines: no breakdown is available by race.
- 4.
Birmingham Mail, 15 May 1945.
- 5.
Negro Digest, 1944, Vol. 3, p. 5.
- 6.
Time Magazine, 11 March 1946.
- 7.
Padmore G(eorge). Coloured Americans’ Legacy to Britain. Problems of Negro GI’s Children. Typescript, 24 April 1947.
- 8.
Time. Plain People. Is there anywhere…, 11 March 1946.
- 9.
In 1947 George Padmore indicated that the League of Coloured Peoples ‘is endeavouring to raise additional funds to set up another home which can provide accommodation for at least a hundred children’.
- 10.
‘The Babies They Left Behind Them’. Life, 23 August 1948, Vol. 25, No. 8, pp. 41–42. See also ‘On the lawn at Somerset’s Holnicote House. Seven children of US negro soldiers and white English mothers beam at the photographer’.
- 11.
Reports of the numbers vary. Carby (2009: 650) suggests that ‘20 brown British babies were wards of Somerset County Council and the Home Office’. Ann Evans who lived in Holnicote House as a mixed race child cites the figure of 27. See Daily Express, 8 July 2000.
- 12.
Documents at the FD Roosevelt Library. Accessed at: www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/ergen/ergen1206.pdf
- 13.
Daily Mail Reporter. ‘Britain “exports” 5,000 babies’. Daily Mail (London), 5 April 1947, p. 3.
- 14.
‘British girls give up babies by US Negroes. 5000 will go to fathers in this country’. Chicago Tribune, 10 April 1947, p. 24.
- 15.
Negroes to Adopt War Babies. The Worker (Brisbane, QLD), 5 July 1948.
- 16.
Tribune Magazine, 1946.
- 17.
Daily Express, 18 December 1947.
- 18.
See The Mix-d Museum, http://www.mix-d.org/museum/timeline/margaret-goosey-and-thomas-johnson; www.mix-d.org/museum/timeline/margaret-goosey-and-thomas-johnson [date accessed 12.01.2018].
- 19.
Daily Herald, 19 December 1947.
- 20.
The Gloucester Citizen, 10 January 1948.
- 21.
Hansard, Commons Debates, 11 February 1948. Oral Answers to Questions—British Subject, USA (Sentence).
- 22.
Daily Worker, 26 January 1948.
- 23.
Daily Express, 19 December 1947; Northampton Mercury, 13 February 1948.
- 24.
Life, 1948, Vol. 25, No. 8.
- 25.
The term, officially, was last used in the decennial US Census of 1920.
- 26.
History of the Pan-African Congress. George Padmore (editor) 1947. The Colour Problem in Britain, 15 October 1945. First Session.
- 27.
Chapman J. Plight of Britain’s Mixed Race Children Abandoned in World War Two Who Are Orphans of War Born to a Lifetime of Fruitless Searching. Daily Express, 8 July 2000. The article contains photographs of the mixed race children living at Holnicote House in 1947 and of Ann Evans’ GI father.
- 28.
Lucy Bland’s important forthcoming (2019) book—Britain’s “Brown Babies”: children born to black GIs and white women in the Second World War (Manchester University Press)—contains interviews with five of the children from Holnicote House whom she has managed to trace.
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Caballero, C., Aspinall, P.J. (2018). ‘Tan Yanks’, ‘Loose Women’ and ‘Brown Babies’: Official Accounts of Mixing and Mixedness During the Second World War. In: Mixed Race Britain in The Twentieth Century. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-33928-7_6
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