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HISTORY
Children at Holnicote House in Somerset
Generation GI
Telling the stories of black GI babies in the UK, a largely undocumented piece of social history is to go on display later this year at Bristol Central Library
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f the three million American servicemen based in Britain between 1942 and 1945, around 240,000 were African American and many of these GIs had relationships with local women. Approximately 2,000 mixed-race children were born following these relationships and many were relocated to the South West, with Holnicote House in Somerset used as a home for mixed-race children. The babies were illegitimate because the American white commanding officers refused black GIs permission to marry their pregnant British girlfriends, and the British government blocked the potential adoption of these children by Americans, including by their fathers, despite great interest from hundreds of African Americans. At the time, the media called them ‘brown babies’. This month, a new exhibition focusing on the untold stories of children born to black GIs and white British women during this period was due to go on display at Bristol Central Library. It builds on important research carried out by Lucy Bland, professor of social and cultural history at Anglia Ruskin University and documented in her recent book Britain’s Brown Babies. Since Professor Bland’s book was released last summer, many more people have come forward to tell their own stories, and the Bristol exhibition featured previously unseen 38 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
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APRIL 2020
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No 190
photographs alongside some explanatory text and quotes from the ‘children’ themselves. “These ‘children’ are now in their seventies and I thought it was important that this significant, and largely undocumented, piece of Britain’s social history was shared with a wider audience before it is too
Ann with her four adoptive brothers