This book reveals the little-known history of the mixed-race children born to black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. Of the three million American soldiers stationed in Britain in 1942–45, about 240,000 were African-American. Their relationships with British women resulted in the birth of an estimated 2,000 children, which the African-American press named ‘brown babies’; the British called them ‘half-castes’.

The American army was racially segregated and Black GIs were forbidden to marry their pregnant white girlfriends. Up to half of these mothers, faced with the stigma of illegitimacy and a mixed-race child, gave up their children for adoption. Often, they ended up in children’s homes, sometimes followed by fostering and occasionally adoption, but adoption societies frequently would not take on ‘coloured’ children, thought ‘too hard to place’.

Based on extensive interviews and including over fifty photographs, Britain’s ‘brown babies’ presents the stories of more than fifty of these children against the backdrop of shifting government policy and attitudes of the time. Lucy Bland brings to light the struggles they faced, including racism in a (then) very white Britain, and a lack of family or a clear identity.

While some of the accounts of early childhood are heart-breaking, there are also many uplifting narratives of finding American fathers and gaining a sense of self and of heritage.