Hello, Derek, our old friend,
We’ve come to sing to you again,
Forty years since those house concerts,
We’re here again wearing nice clean shirts,
And the music
That we made for all to hear,
Still rings clear.
It is the sound of Orwell.

And in the dining room I saw
Two hundred schoolboys, maybe more,
Formed in a choir you could hear them sing,
The Messiah or that Zadok thing,
Hoad and Baxter singing songs
With Wing-Davey
In harmony,
Those were the sounds from Orwell.

While up on Church Field as you know
There was Cottrell in full flow
With Hotz and Harris, Morri and Chas Knight,
The opposition always put to flight,
And just the same in athletics as on the cricket field,
We’d never yield,
We were the boys of Orwell.

Other houses were dismayed
By the prowess we displayed.
You in your Morris Traveller,
Cloake and Davies in our orchestra -
Names forever captured in your memory,
Like him and me,
We all grew up in Orwell.

When Zap called us on his phone
Asking would we come along,
To gather in a private bar
And pay tribute to our housemaster,
It was our pleasure to come here to Pin Mill
Of our free will
To toast the pride of Orwell.

... as sung by Louis Parperis & Steve James on Tuesday 31st July, 2007 on the occasion of Derek Thornbery's 80th birthday.