THE SMILE OF VICTORY

Sports artist Paul Trevillion recounts meeting Sir Winston Churchill nearly 70 years ago, after sending the former prime minister a pen and ink portrait

I was born in Tottenham, London in 1934, the year Sir Winston Churchill celebrated his 60th birthday and just five years later, in 1939, while I was in the infant class at St Francis De Sales School, Britain declared war on Germany following the Nazi invasion of Poland.

My father had a family grocer’s shop. Three times during the heavy bombing raids, the blast from incendiaries blew the front window out and all the contents went flying across Tottenham High Road. On each occasion, the little Winston Churchill figure displayed in the shop was also blown across the road but miraculously, apart from a few small chips, it never got broken.

Each Monday morning, our teacher Miss Stevens stood beside the famous Winston Churchill “Let us go forward together” poster and sternly spelt out the same message: “You are all soldiers without uniforms. When the air raid siren sounds, stand to attention and in an orderly fashion march to the air-raid shelter in the playground. The front row will lead off first…”

My childhood memories of the triumphant smiling face of Churchill in newspapers and cinema news reels, with his victory salute, gave me comfort in knowing that Churchill would never give up and Hitler would be defeated.