The RAF was the only British service to have its own newsreel during the War, producing 18 issues of The Gen between April 1943 and September 1945. Intended ‘to show the service to the service’, the films were shown exclusively to RAF personnel serving at home and overseas. An unpublished history of the Royal Air Force Film Production Unit (RAFFPU), written at the end of the war, explained that each issue had to provide ‘topical interest’ and ‘entertainment’, so that they could be shown ‘in all R.A.F. camp cinemas as part of the normal cinema show’. The document further claimed that ‘The Gen proved to be extremely popular with the Service from the first and was considered by commanders to have very high morale value – particularly for troops overseas, many of whom worked and lived in isolated conditions’ (‘History of the RAFFPU’, 3-4).

Amongst the items featured within The Gen 14 is the story of ‘Jimmy Nathu’, a Gurkha boy, who was ‘adopted’ by the No. 17 squadron in Burma. The item was filmed by Stan Goozee, a sergeant cameraman with the No. 3 RAF Film Production Unit, on 31 January 1945 and appeared not only in this film but also in Indian News Parade 105. As the unedited rushes for the film are also held at IWM (ABY 69), it is possible to see the way in which Goozee constructed this story specifically for use within the newsreels. There are virtually no unused sequences within the unedited rushes, while Goozee’s comments on the accompanying ‘dopesheet’ greatly directed the narrative and language used within the commentary for both The Gen and Indian News Parade. On the ‘dopesheet’, Goozee outlined Jimmy’s story in detail, and noted, for example, that Jimmy calls a Group Captain ‘Uncle George’, has his education funded by the squadron and intends to come to England. This rhetoric of British social welfare and paternal imperialism is particularly emphasised in Indian News Parade 105 – ‘He’s an orphan… or rather he was. Now he has dozens of loving fathers… in fact everybody in the squadron. He calls a Group Captain Uncle George’. Much of the language used within the commentary of The Gen 14 also comes directly from Goozee’s dopesheet (‘Jimmy is a regular erk’), although there are a few lines that don’t make it to the commentary (‘His manners are typically English and apart from his colour he would pass for an English child’).

The story of Jimmy is also told by Richard Townshend Bickers, in his biography of the fighter pilot, Ginger Lacey. Bickers writes in his epilogue that ‘No story that concerns No. 17 squadron in the Second World War should omit mention of the squadron mascot, christened “Jimmie Nutti” and more usually known as “Chico”’. Bickers recalled how Jimmy first came to the squadron’s attention in 1942 when the squadron was living in Alipore, Calcutta. ‘Every day, starving native children used to gather outside the Messes, begging for food’, he explained. The youngest of these – starving, homeless and seriously ill with Malaria – was Nattu Alis Salim, who was taken in by the squadron with the added prefix ‘Jimmie’. Bickers further explained that when the squadron left Malaya to go to Japan, Jimmy was ‘left in good hands at R.A.F. Butterworth, with a substantial sum of money to give him a start in life’ (Bickers, 1988, 203). In 1954 he left Butterworth for Singapore, where he joined the Merchant Service, and when it was decided at a squadron reunion in 1960 to try and trace him, he was found in America. At that time, Jimmy was putting himself through an engineering course at Greer Technical Institute in Chicago, having entered the US illegally. ‘He has since then’, Bickers concluded, ‘appeared in a “This is Your Life” programme in Hollywood, and been visited by one of the squadron’s ex-members from Canada. Finally, he has found a good job to go to on completing his course and obtaining a mechanic’s certificate’ (Bickers, 1988, 204).