Children of Black American GIs: Family and Belonging in Post-war Britain

Families formed in wartime

Around 2,000 children were born to Black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. Their lives extended the history of the wartime American presence beyond military camps and departure dates. Some grew up with their mothers, others with grandparents, foster carers or adoptive parents; others spent years in children’s homes. Historian Lucy Bland’s research has gathered more than sixty first-hand accounts, revealing how differently children experienced the same period. ¹

The fathers had served in forces that maintained racial segregation. Black personnel in Britain often built airfields, drove vehicles and carried out the supply work on which military operations depended. The American Air Museum’s account, written by Imperial War Museums staff, describes the unequal responsibilities and conditions imposed on them. Segregation also reached into leisure: commanders allocated different pub and dance nights to Black and white troops. British reactions were inconsistent. Many people welcomed Black servicemen, while officials worried about upsetting an essential military ally and some businesses accommodated American demands. A friendly reception in a village could therefore exist alongside restrictions on where a soldier could spend his evening. The fathers’ lives were shaped by both military service and these everyday negotiations over respect and access. ²

Couples nevertheless met, danced and fell in love. The Mixed Museum records that Joan Bagwell met Dave Otto Greene at a Somerset dance; their son, Dave Greene, later recalled his mother describing his father as the love of her life. Other relationships began in pubs, at work or through friends. Some partners were single, while others already had spouses or children. Their circumstances cannot be fitted into a single wartime romance. ³

For couples wanting to marry, US military policy generally blocked marriages between Black servicemen and white women. Military authority could therefore prevent families from remaining together. ¹

Mothers and grandmothers who kept families together

The African-American press used the expression “brown babies” for these children. It remains the historical title of the Mixed Museum exhibition, although it cannot describe the full lives of the adults whose testimony it preserves. The exhibition’s accounts of children raised by their mothers make the work of keeping a family together especially visible. Lloyd Hughes’s mother was seventeen when he was born in Street, Somerset. She resisted pressure from a social worker to give him up and supported him through cleaning work and evening shifts as a cinema usherette. They lived with relatives before her later marriage brought a council house and a caring stepfather. ⁴

Arlene Nelson remembered a happy childhood in Lancashire despite racist name-calling. Elaine Drury described being cherished by an extended family near Wigan and protected by childhood friends when outsiders abused her. These memories place affection and solidarity beside discrimination. They also prevent accounts of separation and institutional care from standing for every child in this generation. ⁴

Grandmothers were often central to that practical care. Joyce Brunnen was born in Portsmouth in the bedroom of her mother, Frances. Although Frances considered adoption, Joyce’s grandparents wanted to keep her, adding another child to an already large family. Their decision changed the course of her childhood. In other households, children initially understood grandparents to be their parents, only later learning the relationships within the home. The words children used for their carers did not always match the entries on official documents. ⁵

Rosa Carter remembered the years with her grandmother as a period of being valued, taught and loved. When her grandmother died, Rosa’s mother resisted advice to place her in care. That refusal carried a social cost: a sister living nearby cut off contact for many years. Such recollections show how care depended on decisions made within extended families, sometimes against considerable pressure from other relatives. ⁵

Why some children entered care

The Mixed Museum estimates that between a third and nearly half of the children entered children’s homes. The range is a reminder that this was a dispersed population rather than a neatly recorded national group. Mothers could face pressure from relatives, clergy, local authorities or the institutions caring for unmarried pregnant women. Some were already married; others lacked income, housing or family support. A placement in care therefore needs to be understood through the circumstances surrounding it, rather than treated as proof that a child was unwanted or had no living parents. ⁶

Deborah Prior’s mother, a recently widowed Somerset schoolteacher, concealed her pregnancy while staying with a local vicar. Deborah was placed in Holnicote House nursery. Her account connected that decision with her mother’s position in the community and the anticipated shame attached to a mixed-race child. It is one particular family history, showing how reputation and racial prejudice could combine to separate mother and baby. ⁶

Holnicote also complicates assumptions about institutional childhood. Ann Evans and Carol Edwards remembered care and companionship there, and returned to the Somerset house with David Olusoga for a National Trust podcast recorded in 2024. Their recollections included play, nursery routines and the closeness of the children. Both spoke affectionately about the early years they spent together. The surviving photographs, too, show children playing and sharing activities. These memories deserve the same attention as accounts of cruelty elsewhere. ⁷

The warmth of those early recollections did not settle what happened afterwards. Children generally had to leave the nursery by five, and the security of a familiar group could be broken by the next placement. Ann and Carol’s return made the house a place where former residents could explain their own experiences. Listening to them gives a different view from looking only at an institution’s administrative purpose or at photographs taken by adults visiting it. ⁷

Adoption, prejudice and the search for a lasting home

Research in Somerset’s records has challenged the assumption that few adoptions simply meant nobody offered a home. Lucy Bland and the Mixed Museum’s Chamion Caballero examined newly catalogued material in 2025. Council minutes recorded 269 applications to adopt children described by the authorities as “coloured” between May 1949 and January 1950. Only ten were accepted as suitable, which did not necessarily mean that an adoption followed. The surviving entries do not fully explain the withdrawals and refusals. Their silence matters: it would be misleading to assign one motive to every unsuccessful application. ⁸

The records nevertheless reveal officials’ power over children’s futures. Kathleen Tacchi Morris offered places at her progressive Somerset school, asking only for upkeep costs; the council refused. She subsequently offered to foster a child and was again rejected. Other records document repeated moves between homes. These findings shift attention towards the decisions of institutions and the barriers placed before adults who tried to provide care. ⁸

The outcomes of fostering and adoption also varied. Tony Martin, initially placed in a Barnardo’s home, went at five to a family in Balsham, Cambridgeshire. The couple had already fostered other children. He remained there happily throughout his childhood, calling them his parents and the other children his siblings, although he was never formally adopted. His account makes clear that a lasting family relationship could develop without an adoption order. ⁹

Ann Evans was adopted at five by a couple in South Wales who already had grown-up sons. She remembered affection within the family, but an outsider disclosed her adoption to her in a hurtful encounter when she was thirteen. Her grandmother reassured her that she was loved. Ann’s experience separates two questions often bundled together: whether a child had a loving home, and whether adults allowed that child to understand their own history. Affection could coexist with secrecy. ⁹

Growing up and building adult lives

Suffolk Archives places two Ipswich childhoods alongside one another. Mick Brummitt, born in 1944, grew up with his mother, Sylvia, in a loving home. His father, Jimmie W. Oliver, had served with an aviation engineering battalion at Debach before being posted to France. Babs Gibson Ward, also born in Ipswich in 1944, entered a Barnardo’s home in Long Melford and was later fostered. Their shared birthplace and parentage did not produce the same family life. ¹⁰

Babs endured a turbulent childhood and a teacher’s racist assertion that she lacked the ability of a white child. She subsequently worked in nursing and tutoring and completed a master’s degree in music in her seventies. Mick’s later family research brought a different kind of discovery: although his father had died and they never met, he met an American half-brother in Georgia in 2004. Their histories contain achievement and new relationships as well as the difficulties of childhood. ¹⁰

Adult lives took many directions. The Mixed Museum records work in nursing, social care, engineering, the railways, public service and the arts. Deborah Prior became a cadet nurse at sixteen and remembered the importance of meeting other people of colour again. She later moved to Australia and worked in nursing leadership. Elaine Drury also entered nursing, then ran a playgroup and qualified as a social worker after raising children. These careers place the generation within the institutions and everyday work of post-war society. ¹¹

Arlene Nelson’s testimony shows that professional adulthood did not end encounters with racism. After she moved near Dundee with her husband and children, neighbours feared that her presence would reduce house prices. She recalled those attitudes changing as people got to know her. Personal acceptance could be won, but having to establish it repeatedly remained a burden. Her account connects the child who faced name-calling with the adult building a household and a working life. ¹¹

Finding relatives across the Atlantic

For some, the search for a father lasted decades. Dave Greene was unusual in knowing about his father through his mother. With help from a friend, he followed possible addresses and telephone numbers in 1999. A small difference between the middle name he remembered and his father’s actual name complicated the first conversations. Once they established their connection, they talked at length and Dave travelled to the United States to meet him. ¹²

Brian Lawrenson followed another route. An acquaintance of his mother supplied the name Ira Smith and a photograph. Brian eventually found an obituary that identified his father’s wider family, enabling him to contact an aunt in Oklahoma. These accounts show why photographs, remembered names, newspaper notices and the knowledge of friends could be decisive. Finding relatives did not always mean finding a living father. It could instead mean learning that a father had spoken about a child in Britain, or meeting people who could supply memories that had been missing. ¹²

The work continues across generations. In a 2025 account, Jean Rimes’s daughter Bec Matthews described visiting relatives in Georgia with her own daughter, Esther. Before the journey, new family information overturned an earlier identification of Jean’s father. Bec worked with genealogical researcher Sally Vincent and the Mixed Museum’s scientist in residence, Sophie Kay, to reconsider documentary and DNA evidence. Her account acknowledges the emotional difficulty of becoming attached to one family story and then having to revise it. ¹³

In Georgia, relatives welcomed Bec and Esther into meals, birthday celebrations and church visits. The relationships involved conversation and shared memories as well as a corrected family tree. This history is still being made: descendants can recover information, challenge an old assumption and build connections their parents never had. Bec’s published account also demonstrates why earlier research needs checking against later testimony, especially where an identification once seemed settled. ¹³

A shared history, told in their own voices

The Mixed Museum’s project Reclaiming Histories Through Science brought wartime children and their descendants together to discuss family research and its consequences. Online meetings began in October 2023. Participants described the relief of encountering people with comparable experiences, sometimes after a lifetime without anyone who understood their particular background. Arlene Nelson, herself one of the wartime children, helped the project through her work connecting families. Those whose lives form this history have therefore also helped shape how it is collected and shared. ¹⁴

The discussions included children and grandchildren considering the continuing effects of silence, separation and racism within families. They also created room for affection, discoveries and renewed relationships. Such exchanges allow different experiences to sit alongside one another without requiring agreement about every childhood or every reunion. Belonging can grow through meeting others with a similar history, whether or not a family search produces all the answers. ¹⁴

Bland’s interviews, preserved through the Black Cultural Archives, and the exhibition developed from them make these lives part of a public record: the children who grew up here, the people who cared for them, and the knowledge they have chosen to pass on. ¹

Sources

[1] Anglia Ruskin University. History: War babies of Black GIs and British women; Undated; REF 2021 impact case study.

[2] American Air Museum in Britain; written by Imperial War Museums staff. “They treated us royally”? Black Americans in Britain during the Second World War.

[3] The Mixed Museum; exhibition curated by Lucy Bland. How the parents met; Undated exhibition panel.

[4] The Mixed Museum; exhibition curated by Lucy Bland. Mixed-race children kept by their mothers; Undated exhibition panel.

[5] The Mixed Museum; exhibition curated by Lucy Bland. Mixed-race children largely cared for by their grandmothers; Undated exhibition panel.

[6] The Mixed Museum; exhibition curated by Lucy Bland. Mixed-race children given up to children’s homes; Undated exhibition panel.

[7] The Mixed Museum. Returning to Holnicote House: The Mixed Museum helps the National Trust explore “brown babies” history; 14 October 2024.

[8] The Mixed Museum. A research trip to Taunton: Revisiting the records of Somerset’s WW2 “brown babies”; 14 November 2025.

[9] The Mixed Museum; exhibition curated by Lucy Bland. Adoption and Fostering; Undated exhibition panel.

[10] Suffolk Archives, Sharing Suffolk Stories. “Workin’ on those airdromes”: Relationships, Love and “Brown Babies”.

[11] The Mixed Museum; exhibition curated by Lucy Bland. Adulthood; Undated exhibition panel.

[12] The Mixed Museum; exhibition curated by Lucy Bland. Finding Mothers and Fathers; Undated exhibition panel.

[13] The Mixed Museum; guest account by Bec Matthews. Bec Matthews on finally meeting her African American family; 21 November 2025.

[14] The Mixed Museum. “We are not alone”; 15 January 2024.

Sources checked on 23 October 2026.