Britain was certainly no utopia. In the aftermath of the First World War in 1919, with employment and housing shortages in the face of millions of demobilised soldiers, there were race riots in several cities primarily targeting black sailors resulting in five fatalities, and during the interwar years racial prejudice became "widespread and institutionalised" (Stephen Bourne, Mother Country: Britain's Black Community on the Home Front 1939–45). British army officers, for example, had to be "of pure European descent", though this was overturned in October 1939 when war once again required rapid mobilisation. It wasn't universal, however; Bourne also writes about the Cozier family of Canning Town, a black father and white mother with eight children one of whom said "White and black people respected each other. When I grew up in the 1930s, racial prejudice did not exist in our community."

Bourne suggests there were around 15,000 black and mixed race citizens in the UK in September 1939, though notes that there are no official figures and estimates range from 8,000 to 40,000. In June 1944 there were 130,000 African American GIs in the country, and in the words of David Olusoga in Black and British: A Forgotten History they were "welcomed with open arms"; the British "proved extraordinarily welcoming", in areas that had few or no black residents "they were an exciting novelty and rather rapidly became particularly popular among the British public". Olusoga notes that "this did not mean that racial prejudice had somehow disappeared" - the circumstances were specific, the GIs were coming to the aid of beleaguered Britain, not competing for jobs and housing with local residents. In fact they provided a welcome economic boost thanks to their generous pay and provisioning (see also another post from a while ago about the 'overpaid and oversexed' epithet).

Again the situation was not universal; Major General Arthur Dowler, Senior Administrative Officer in the region where most black GIs were deployed, unofficially wrote "Notes on Relations with Coloured Troops" in 1942 suggesting that the British conform to the ideas of white American citizens regarding segregation and presenting a stereotypically racist depiction of 'coloured men'; the War Cabinet concluded that "it would not oppose the American army's policy of segregation but would not permit British authorities, military or civilian, to play a part in enforcing it". Romantic relationships between white women and black men caused tensions, though not only for racial reasons, extramarital affairs with black or white Americans while British husbands were serving overseas were not conducive to Anglo-American relations (of the political/military variety). Mrs May, wife of the vicar of the village of Worle in Somerset, took it upon herself to issue a six point code of conduct when black GIs were stationed in the area to minimise any contact with white women stipulating that "White women, of course, must have no social relationship with coloured troops".

The reaction to Mrs May's code lends weight to Olusoga's depiction of the British, for the most part, welcoming black GIs. An article in the Sunday Pictorial quoted a local woman as being "... disgusted, and so were most of the women there. We have no intention of agreeing to her decree." An editorial assured arriving black GIs that they "will find the vast majority of people here have nothing but repugnance for the narrow-minded, uninformed prejudices expressed by the vicar's wife. There is - and will be - no persecution of coloured people in Britain" - clearly something of an overstatement, but there are numerous other accounts of adverse reactions to white GIs attempting to enforce segregation or mistreating either their own comrades or black British and Commonwealth citizens (e.g. 'My Black Uncle' on the BBC People's War website, Olusoga mentions a pub in Bristol displaying a sign "Only blacks served here"). In part this was due to the contrast to white American troops who were more likely to complain about the privations of wartime Britain, and more likely to be flashy with their money. Olusoga quotes George Orwell from December 1943: "The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes", and from a letter from a Wiltshire woman: "Everybody here adores the Negro toops [...] but nobody likes the white Americans. They swagger about us as if they were the only people fighting this war. They all get so drunk and look so untidy while the Negroes are very polite, much smarter".

Olusoga concludes that "Exposure to the full virulence of American racism had powerfully demonstrated that British sentiments were profoundly different from those that prevailed in the American South, but the war had also shown that on the issue of racial mixing, some Britons were less enlightened. (...) What is certain is that British attitudes were changed by the war, not just from the experience of living alongside the black GIs and fighting alongside airmen and soldiers from the black colonies, but through what had been learnt during the conflict about Nazi racial policies."