An article in The Children’s Newspaper in March 1947 wrote of a ‘fascinating new film’, which took the form of a letter and showed two young boys exploring the Wankie Game Reserve. The article explained that ‘the film was made primarily to be shown at children’s cinema clubs in Britain, but is naturally popular in Rhodesia itself’ (The Children’s Newspaper, 29 March 1947, 3). Mary Field, the head of Children’s Entertainment Films, also noted that the Pen Picture series ‘has proved internationally successful’ (Field, 1953, 76).

The film did not appear in England until 1948. In August 1948 The Children’s Newspaper again wrote of Pen Pictures From Rhodesia – ‘the new film series at the Children’s Cinema Clubs’ – and noted that the two boys within the film, seven-year-old Roddie and five-year-old Jerry, were the sons of the Wankie Game Warden, Edward (Ted) Davison (The Children’s Newspaper, 7 August 1948, 6). Davison had become the park’s first game warden in 1928 at the age of twenty-two, and built up the reserve by mapping the area, countering poachers, charting animal movements, controlling tsetse fly and establishing the park as a tourist attraction, until 1961 when be became deputy director general of national parks (The Times, 15 June 1982, 12).

Mary Field noted that the series of five one-reel films ‘combines experience gained from the Magic Globe series and Escape from Norway’. She explained that ‘it was by the detailed information which managers sent us that we were able to evolve the right method of making children’s travel films, dropping the complicated technique of the early Magic Globe Series and developing the simplicity of the Pen Picture Series’ (Field, 1953, 180, 76). The films were made by Frank Goodliffe, who started working for the Southern Rhodesian Government in 1947 as Films Officer to the Public Relations Department, producing films that were screened predominantly in clubs, schools and by mobile cinemas (Mangin, 1998. 18).