Fury over Winston Churchill’s cigar being airbrushed from 1948 photograph

LONDON - Art enthusiasts in the UK are furious after it was found that a photograph of former Prime Minster Winston Churchill taken in 1948 and placed in the main entrance to a London museum was airbrushed to remove his signature cigar.

In the original image, Churchill makes a “V” shaped symbol with his fingers with a cigar in his mouth, but in a reproduction of the picture, he has been made into a non-smoker through the use of image-altering techniques.

David McAdam, a visitor to the museum, noticed the alteration.

“I pointed out this crude alteration to a museum steward who said she hadn’t noticed the change before, nor had anyone else pointed it out. So much for the notion that only communist tyrants airbrushed history,” The Telegraph quoted McAdam, as saying.

Meanwhile, manager of the museum, John Welsh, said that he was shocked to learn of the alteration.

“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,” Welsh said.

Alan Packwood, of the Churchill Archives Centre, said he was not aware of any previous case where Churchill’s cigar had been digitally removed from a picture. (ANI)