Finest hour: Churchill to be on UK bank note

[April 27, 2013]  LONDON (AP) -- Here's a choice not likely to be too controversial: officials say wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill's portrait will be featured on a new 5-pound note.

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King made the announcement Friday at Chartwell, Churchill's former home, surrounded by members of the late leader's family.

King called Churchill "a truly great British leader, orator and writer."

The bank says the note is likely to be issued in 2016. It will be based on a famous portrait photographed by Yousuf Karsh in Ottawa in 1941.

The note will also bear Churchill's wartime declaration that he has "nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

British bank notes celebrate a range of historical figures, and the central bank occasionally changes the designs.

Churchill will replace the 19th-century social reformer Elizabeth Fry.

Churchill, credited with strengthening British resolve during the darkest days of World War II, was prime minister from 1940 to 1945, and again between 1951 and 1955. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his works of history and biography and his "brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values."

[Associated Press]

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