Butterfly loved by Churchill back in England after almost 100 years

Winston Churchill was such a fan of the black-veined white butterfly that he tried to reintroduce the extinct species into his back garden in the 1940s. Photograph: Adam Gor/Butterfly Conservation/PA

When they last roamed England in 1925, they counted Winston Churchill as a fan. Now, black-veined whites – an extremely rare species of British butterfly – have been spotted fluttering once again.

Small numbers of the black and white insects have been spotted in fields and hedgerows in south-east London, nearly a century after the species was thought to have become extinct in the UK.