Steve Reeves' Britain Called and We Answered Honours Windrush Elders

Photographer Steve Reeves has published a book of portraits and testimonies of the Caribbean men and women who came to rebuild Britain after the Second World War. The full title does the work of a synopsis: Britain Called and We Answered – Portraits and Stories of Those Who Came from the Caribbean to England to Help Rebuild the Country After the 2nd World War, published by Reeves & Reeves at £29.

The format is simple. Portraits of "elders", as Reeves respectfully calls them, sit alongside short accounts of their lives. Some run a few lines; others fill a couple of pages. Some close with a single sentence giving a date of birth and a date of death. This generation, as the review on 1854 Photography notes, will not be with us much longer, and recording their experiences is valuable precisely because of that. Against rising racism in the UK and beyond, the book's acknowledgment of their contribution works as a counterweight to ill-informed stereotypes and insinuations.

Why did they come?

Britain asked them. The country broadcast calls throughout its Empire, inviting workers to a motherland stricken by years of war. Some who answered needed work badly; others were youngsters chasing adventure, leaving behind already prosperous, established lives.

Carmen is one of the latter cases in spirit. Photographed in her house in Balham, London, she was shocked by British living standards — the accommodation she saw in Balham was paltry compared with where she had grown up in Jamaica. When she wrote home, Reeves notes, "She didn't dare mention the conditions to her mum."

What happened next?

Carmen built a life. She now owns her Balham house outright, in an area that has since turned wealthy, with prosperous families moving in and out. Sometimes people ask what she is doing there. Her reply: she has lived there since before they were born.

She is proud of a grandson starting a degree in Edinburgh soon. "If you get an education, it's in your head," she says. "Nobody can steal that."

How do the book's voices handle racism?

Others speak of the racism they encountered in England. One subject is cheerily blunt, noting that the National Front supporters on her estate were the ones working the dead-end jobs.

Many of those depicted contributed to public services such as the NHS, founded at the end of the war. As the review puts it, migrants should not have to prove their worth, but their actions — and the NHS itself — speak of a more optimistic era, of ideals about community and how people might contribute, share and support.

Who gets it for free?

Reeves made the book in partnership with the charity Positive Network, and it is being made freely available to local residents as part of Wandsworth's year as London Borough of Culture. Marsha De Cordova, Labour MP for Battersea, Balham & Wandsworth, calls that gesture powerful in itself in her foreword. It speaks, she writes, of the fact "that access to history matters, that culture belongs to everyone, and that we have a responsibility not only to remember the Windrush generation, but to act on the lessons their experiences demand".

Britain Called and We Answered is published by Reeves & Reeves, priced £29, and available through Steve Reeves' website. With its subjects in their final years, the book doubles as both tribute and archive — a record assembled, fittingly, in the borough where many of those lives unfolded.