These choir members were in full voice, but the song they were singing did not usually feature in their concerts.

They were serenading their only surviving founder-member on his 80th birthday with, appropriately, a worthy rendition of Happy Birthday.

Tom Jones – known as the ‘Original Tom Jones’ – had spent more than 50 years as a member of what had become the Oxford Welsh Male Voice Choir.

Sixty choir members and their families gathered at the Nut Tree pub at Murcot, near Bicester, in 1984 to pay tribute to his long service.

Apart from the lusty singing of Happy Birthday, they also presented him with a plaque, which he is seen holding in the picture above.

Mr Jones came to Oxford in 1927 from his native Merthyr, where he had been a coal miner.

He was one of hundreds of Welshmen who migrated to Oxford with their families at the time of the Great Depression looking for work at the Morris Motors’ car assembly factory and at the neighbouring Pressed Steel car body plant.

The choir began in 1928 as an entirely ad hoc affair – a group of young, lonely expatriate Welshmen drowning their sorrows over an evening pint at the Cape of Good Hope pub at The Plain.

Legend has it that as they sat in the pub, they began to sing the melodies which reminded them of home and chapel.

Starting as an octet, the group quickly expanded, taking on the formal titles of the Cowley Male Voice Choir, then the Oxford Welsh Prize Glee Singers and finally the Oxford Welsh Male Voice Choir.

Mr Jones, of Ridgefield Road, East Oxford, who sang tenor in more than 1,000 concerts, worked at Pressed Steel for 42 years before becoming a Scout at St Edmund Hall, where he stayed for 12 years.

He was also a well-known Oxford cricketer. He died in 1996, aged 92.

Over the years, the choir has given many concerts in Oxford as well as performing at the Royal Albert Hall, Westminster Abbey and at Cardiff Arms Park and at venues in Ireland, Holland, South Africa and the United States.

Many of its concerts are for charity and it has raised thousands of pounds for good causes.

To mark its 75th anniversary in 2003, members completed a 110-mile walk in six days to Risca in South Wales, where many came from to seek work, raising £4,000 in sponsorship on the way. Some brave souls even walked back!

Today, the choir is as strong as ever and planning a full programme of events in 2015, including a St David’s Day concert at Wesley Memorial Church in New Inn Hall Street, Oxford, on Saturday.