COR blimey, strike a light! Who’s stubbed out Winnie’s trademark cigar?

That’s the question that’s being asked after a giant airbrushed image of Sir Winston Churchill – minus the familiar cigar – appeared outside the Britain at War Experience in South-East London.

Has Britain’s great wartime leader fallen victim to over-zealous political correctness?

Such things have happened before – as was the case with the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose cigar was tastefully “removed” from a picture of him on the front of a school textbook a few years ago.

But according to the Daily Mail, it wasn’t the anti-smoking lobby and it certainly wasn’t the great man’s family who ordered the airbrushing on this occasion.

And it wasn’t anything to do with the museum either – indeed, the manager is said to be “astonished” to have been told that the cigar was missing from the picture.

It sounds like one of those famous “three-pipe problems” for Sherlock Holmes (as represented here by Basil Rathbone, pictured puffing thoughtfully above right).

We’re happy to reproduce his image – along with those of iconic fellow smokers Humphrey Bogart and Marlene Dietrich – before the airbrushing mania spreads further.