As the world rallied against the Nazis during the second world war, white US military police wantonly attacked their own black servicemen in the Lancashire village of Bamber Bridge in 1943. It was this forgotten history that inspired producer Jemma Rodgers to create the story of Abe, a young black American soldier featured in The Railway Children Return.
Set in 1944, the sequel to the beloved 1970 children’s classic film adapted from Edith Nesbit’s novel features Jenny Agutter reprising her original role as Bobbie. Now a grandmother, Bobbie and her daughter take in three evacuee children who stumble across Abe (Kenneth Aikens), a wounded black American soldier hiding in a railway carriage. When it transpires that he fled the US military because of racial discrimination, the children agree to help hide him.
But the fictional black serviceman’s storyline has ignited a chorus of criticism over the reboot’s historical authenticity.
The Telegraph claimed it had been given the “21st-century culture war treatment”, comparing the film’s young protagonists to “Twitter-fixated millennials in the year 2022”. The Daily Mail acknowledged the history underlying the black soldier’s storyline, but concluded that the film’s “deference to modern sensibilities” was “a little jarring”.
At a time when Jim Crow laws legalised racial segregation in the US, the experience of racial discrimination encapsulated by Abe is far from a “woke” historical whitewashing.
“He just tells the tale of something that was common throughout segregated American military forces,” said Clinton Smith, the chair of Preston Black History Group. “What he saw in his short time in the army was segregation, racism, and discrimination.”
During the second world war, about 130,000 US troops who arrived in Britain were black. These black servicemen were mostly limited to service and supply roles. Black US servicemen were grouped into all-black units, and they were expected to segregate in social settings, including pubs where designated days for white and ‘coloured’ soldiers were enforced by US commanders.
While researching the sequel, Rodgers’ own mixed heritage led her down a historical rabbit hole about the presence of black Britons who arrived before the Windrush generation came from the Caribbean in 1948.
“I’ve always been interested in the stories of people of colour before Windrush, because my family predate Windrush,” said Rodgers, whose great-grandfather came to Devon in the late 19th century from Jamaica.
“There’s quite a lot of social political world events going on even behind the original film, so I was very keen to get something into this one that also had a sort of contemporary social political relevance, but was appropriate for that era.”
The Battle of Bamber Bridge, an uprising in June 1943 of black US servicemen and locals from the village who fought against US military police attempting to violently implement Jim Crow segregation there, caught Rodgers’ attention. She discovered that locals retaliating against the US military police had put up signs in their windows saying: ‘Only black troops allowed and locals.’
Positive attitudes towards African American GIs began to erode when interracial relationships between the servicemen and white British women arose, and about 2,000 mixed-race babies were born. But in the years preceding, the black GIs generally received a warm reception in villages and towns where they were stationed.
“Locals still talk about the welcome given to the black GIs and the violence that erupted that night,” said Alan Rice, a professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, who was a historical consultant on the film. The violence of Bamber Bridge, he said, was attributed to the “racist overreaction” of a military police seeking to import American racism.
One black American soldier, Private William Crossland, was killed that night on 24 June in the gunfire that erupted between the two sides. In June, a memorial garden commemorating the battle was installed opposite the pub where the uprising started.
“There was never any question of an inquiry into that action, let alone any justice for him,” Rice said of Crossland’s death. “In fact, villagers woke up the next morning to knocks at the door from military police collecting bullets that had entered their houses, ostensibly for evidence, but actually to make sure the investigation stayed within the military.”
The racial uprising in Bamber Bridge was not the only one of its kind. In the Cornish town of Launceston, another shootout occurred on 26 September 1943 when black US servicemen confronted a group of US military policemen after they were excluded from pubs. That became the subject of Kate Werran’s book An American Uprising.
Werran rebuked claims that The Railway Children Return was “woke”, emphasising that it was a “more truthful narrative” of an “American occupation” of Britain during the second world war that imported American-style racism, and inspired unlikely solidarity between British villagers and African American GIs.
“It’s remarkable how similar and modern it all feels but all this, plus a general British sympathy for African American GIs, has been largely written out of the history books,” she said. “It’s fantastic that it is finally being recognised, and is back where it always should have been. Bravo is what I say – and encore!”
• This article was amended on 9 July 2022 to correct the spelling of Bamber Bridge. An earlier version had it as “Bamber Ridge” at several mentions.
