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.”
