London, June 16 (IANS) Gripping a cigar in the corner of mouth, the signature style of Britain’s former Prime Minister Winston Churchill has been airbrushed in a reproduced version of his photograph displayed at the British museum.
In the original image, Churchill was seen making a ‘V’ (victory) sign with his fingers while gripping a cigar in the corner of his mouth. But in a reproduced picture, hanging over the main entrance to a London museum, Churchill has been shown as a non-smoker.
It is unclear who is responsible for doctoring the photograph with the museum – Winston Churchill’s Britain at War Experience – claiming not to have noticed the cigar was missing, reported The Telegraph.
John Welsh, manager of the museum, said he was shocked to learn of the alteration, but declined to reveal who was responsible for the display and for enlarging the image.
‘We’ve got all sorts of images in the museum, some with cigars and some without. We’ve even got wartime adverts for cigarettes in the lift down to the air-raid shelter; so we wouldn’t have asked for there to be no cigar,’ he said.
Don Robinson, who owned the museum before passing it to a charitable trust 20 years ago, added: ‘If we’d known we would have said: ‘No, it stays as it is.’ Everything we do we try to do accurately and the cigar symbolises Churchill’.
