Onto the page: How the WW2 ‘brown babies’ history of Holnicote House is inspiring children’s fiction
Five years after the publication of Professor Lucy Bland’s landmark book Britain’s ‘Brown Babies’, the stories of the mixed race children born to Black GIs and white British women in the Second World War continue to inspire new generations of writers.
Holnicote House, a former residential nursery for the so-called ‘brown babies,’ has become the backdrop for several new works of children’s fiction, including J. P. Rose’s recently published novel Birdie and E. L. Norry’s Fablehouse series. The Mixed Museum’s Freelance Editorial Director Laura Smith meets the authors transforming the historical experiences of the ‘brown babies’ into powerful stories that highlight resilience, joy, and the search for belonging.
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BOOK GIVEAWAY WINNER
To celebrate the publication of Birdie and Fablehouse: Heart of Fire this year - and the ‘brown babies’ history featuring on the National Trust’s Podcast series - we gave away a copy of Birdie, the Fablehouse series and Britain's Brown Babies.
The lucky winner is: M.W! Congratulations! Your book bundle is on its way.
Many thanks to Andersen Press, Bloomsbury Children’s Books and Manchester University Press for the prizes - and of course to all those who entered and providing the correct answer: Holnicote House.
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J. P. Rose’s new children’s novel Birdie
The cover of Birdie and author J. P. Rose. Images: courtesy Andersen Press
The author Jacqui Rose says she has heard the voice of Birdie, the main character in her new children’s book, ever since she was a child herself.
“I was adopted when I was little and went to live in an all-white mining village, so I was just trying to find my identity, which was really difficult,” she explains. “I found a safe space within writing and I used to create characters. Birdie was one of those characters – she had a voice, and she owned her voice. I often wished I was more like her.”
Jacqui is a bestselling author of 18 thrillers, but describes writing for children as her “first love”. After publishing her first book for teenagers, The Haunting of Tyrese Walker, in 2022, Jacqui knew it was time to write about the girl who had been a voice in her head for so long. “She was such a loud voice, I just had to put it down,” she says.
But it wasn’t until she learned about the history of Holnicote House, and its connection to the ‘brown babies’ born to Black GIs and white British women during World War Two, that she knew she’d found the right story.
How Holnicote House’s history helped Birdie come to life
Holnicote House was a National Trust building requisitioned in 1943 by Somerset County Council, and later used as a residential nursery to house ‘brown babies’, many of whom were removed from their mothers as young as one or two weeks old.
“I knew I didn’t want Birdie’s story to take place in the 1970s, when I grew up; I wanted to go further back,” explains Jacqui. “So I just started reading, reading, reading because I didn't want to force the story. Birdie was too important to shoehorn into a situation.”
Around this time, she came across The Mixed Museum, and, through it, discovered Professor Lucy Bland’s book, Britain’s ‘Brown Babies. “I read about Holnicote House, and I thought, ‘What would it be like if Birdie had been brought up in this loving environment, with other brown babies, but had to leave, like I had to leave my family?’ And finally, I knew I had my story.”
The resulting book, Birdie – published in October 2024 under Jacqui’s pseudonym J. P. Rose – tells the story of a mixed race girl who leaves a loving children’s home to live with her great-aunt in a small mining village in 1950s Yorkshire. Struggling to fit in, she finds solace in a friendship with the village’s last remaining pit pony.
The book is only the latest children’s novel to be inspired by Holnicote House, where up to 30 ‘brown babies’ lived until the age of five in the Somerset countryside. Fablehouse, published in 2023 and described by The Guardian as a “thrilling, atmospheric fantasy”, was followed in 2024 by the second in the series, Fablehouse: Heart of Fire.
Britain’s ‘brown babies’ in children’s fiction: Fablehouse
E. L. Norry with Fablehouse book covers, illustrated by Thy Bui. Images: courtesy Bloomsbury Children's Books.
The books tell the story of ‘The Roamers’, four mixed children brought up in a children’s home called Fablehouse – loosely based on Holnicote – who face down evil forces with the help of a Black knight.
The books’ author, Emma Norry, who writes under E. L. Norry, weaved in myths, legends and a sense of the power of nature throughout the book, and says Holnicote offered the perfect setting for that.
“It’s a really inspiring place for a writer,” she says. “I mean, growing up in a children’s home myself, it’s a place where you have a whole heap of children together, kind of like a school dynamic, where people haven’t got a choice about being there. That’s where stories are forged, really. For a writer, it’s like a container.”
Jasmine Richards, Founder of inclusive children’s fiction studio Storymix, came up with the idea for Fablehouse and handpicked Emma to write it. She first learned about the ‘brown babies’ from a 2019 BBC article and remembers, “I saw the headline and I just had this feeling that there were going to be some very interesting stories to be told.”
She went on to buy Lucy Bland’s book and says, “There were a couple of moments in the book that really stuck with me. One was this idea that the stories of lots of the children weren't necessarily happy ones. But there were also these moments of joy. And one of those moments of joy was at Holnicote House. Even when they’re relaying those memories about living there, you can feel this sort of golden sheen around it.”
Emma agrees. “The amazing thing about Holnicote at that time is you get all these ‘brown babies’ together, everyone feeling that they belong,” she says. “You wouldn’t normally get that in the 1950s, and it’s pretty rare even now. So you instantly have that sense that they’re all in the same boat.”
Storymix exists to diversify the kinds of children’s stories that get published, and Jasmine is adamant about moving away from the idea that Black or mixed stories must centre trauma. “The ‘brown babies’ story is complicated, and there’s definitely lots of trauma there, but there was joy there as well,” she says. “And that sense of found family.
“I feel like we've all got a part to play as creators, and the role I want to take up is joy, actually. Especially when it comes to kids’ fiction and for kids that may be coming to this history for the first time, for it not to be bleak.”
Professor Lucy Bland on the impact of her ‘brown babies’ research
Emma says touring dozens of UK schools with Fablehouse and then again with the follow-up has been eye-opening. “I don’t think anyone that I visited had heard of the history whatsoever,” she says. “So it was amazing to be able to share the history and direct the kids, the teachers and the librarians to The Mixed Museum.
E. L. Norry visiting schools to talk about Fablehouse. Images: courtesy Bloomsbury Children's Books
“Some of the young people I spoke to definitely said it made them feel more connected. These aren’t dusty kings and queens. It’s people they could still meet down at the community centre. It really was a privilege to be able to help spread this knowledge.”
Lucy Bland, who is a Professor of Social and Cultural History at Anglia Ruskin University, first came across the ‘brown babies’ and Holnicote House through Mixed Britannia, a 2011 BBC series presented by George Alagiah which uncovered “the previously untold history of Britain's mixed-race community”. The series was based on research by Drs Chamion Caballero and Peter Aspinall – research that later formed the basis for The Mixed Museum.
Aware that many of the people referenced in the show might still be alive, Lucy spent years tracking them down, interviewing 45 ‘brown babies’ for what would become her book. She says she never imagined the impact it would have. “I am constantly amazed and delighted,” she says. “I had no idea that it would take off, and the interest would carry on and on. Up until then, I’d written books about people who were dead. And I loved doing the work, but I had not actually done oral history because there was no one to talk to.”
Since Britain’s ‘Brown Babies’ was published in 2019, she has spoken to government departments, academic conferences, local organisations and “talks in all kinds of unlikely places” about the book.
“You get this really interesting cross section of people,” she says. “The ‘brown babies’, of course, and other mixed people, and then others who are interested in general history and still others in military history. So I think it has this really wide appeal. But what really, I think, gets to people is the personal and very emotional stories that a lot of people can relate to.”
Holnicote House: “A place out of time”
Lucy has read and “absolutely loved” both Birdie and Fablehouse. She describes novelists being inspired by her work as “extraordinary and just wonderful”, adding: “I do think children’s fiction can tap emotional feelings in a way that more straightforward history writing can’t. And there’s huge value in that.”
Why does she think Holnicote House in particular inspires such creative outpourings? “It’s this place out of time, isn’t it? A place that was idyllic, but could not last, because you had to leave at the age of five.”
What struck Jacqui, reading the stories in Lucy’s book, was how little seemed to change between the book’s post-war childhoods and her own. “I was brought up in the 70s, 20 years later, and a lot of things hadn’t moved on.”
She describes herself as a “very visual author” and says it was a “beautiful picture” from The Mixed Museum’s exhibition based on the book – of a group of Holnicote’s ‘brown babies’ sitting on their tricycles – that convinced her this was the right setting in which Birdie’s story would begin. “They look happy, they look safe, they were together, and I loved that. And that was really the spark.”
Learn more
Learn about TMM’s role helping the National Trust to share Holincote House’s ‘brown babies’ history.
Read our interview with Fablehouse author E. L. Norry, In Conversation with The Mixed Museum
Watch E. L. Norry, Lucy Bland, Chamion Caballero and 'brown babies' Ann Evans discuss the history behind Fablehouse at the Foundling Museum last year.
Note: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a book purchase at Waterstones through these links, The Mixed Museum may earn a small commission to support our core work at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting us!