Walter Hooper wrote that '[d]uring his third year at Oxford he realized that Lewis was a Christian, and in his own search for truth he was led to the Catholic Church. He took his BA in 1938 and his MA in 1947. Over time his friendship with Lewis led him to became friends with Warnie Lewis, Mrs. Janie Moore, and Maureen Moore as well."
C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, 723

Julian Roskans' obituary in the Nov. 4, Guardian Unlimited stated that "It was in the form room at Malvern College that George Sayer...made the greatest impact. He had a challenging and arresting manner of teaching, which allowed for no sitting on the fence. He exacted from his classes the very highest standards, all the time encouraging individual expression and interpretation. He guided pupils towards sensitive and thoughtful enjoyment of literature. "Never conventional, he always said what he believed. He was renowned for his kindness and sympathy, the sobriquet 'avuncular' being most commonly employed by staff and pupils alike.
"[Popular British TV University Challenge moderator] Jeremy Paxman was a college pupil from 1964 until 1968. He would not have been alone in describing George as 'the most wonderful, inspirational teacher ... a profoundly decent and compassionate man ... the sort of teacher you dream of having..."
After his World War II service as a captain in Army Intelligence, Sayer took up teaching English at Malvern College in 1945, becoming senior English master in 1949. After 33 years at Malvern, where Warren Lewis had matriculated and C.S. Lewis had studied one year, he retired as head of English in 1974 and served as college librarian until 1978.

.Roskans' obituary continues: "Teaching aside, George had a vital part to play in the re-establishment of artistic and academic standards at the college that had inevitably suffered in the hectic last years of the war. He certainly left a lasting legacy by founding the college wine society. "While in Malvern, George often had the pleasure of entertaining Lewis, by now a close friend. The two delighted in walking the Malvern hills, discussing literature and mutual friends, such as Tolkien. On his return visits to Oxford, George sometimes went to meetings of the Inklings, a gathering of friends, most of them teachers and many of them creative writers and lovers of imaginative literature. After Lewis's death, he was made a trustee of the writer's estate..."
George's first wife, Moira Casey, who he married in 1940, died of cancer in 1977. He married to Margaret Cronin, who survives him, in 1983, "and much enjoyed being stepfather to her children, who loved Lewis's Narnia stories. Their shared hobbies included gardening, reading and Mozart."
For this writer, the Oct. 30 E-news of George's death, although not unexpected, was still a sad shock. In one of those coincidences that is, of course, actual grace, I had just retrieved Jack from our best bookcase in order to prepare for a presentation on the Lewis-Tolkien friendship to be delivered at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, Nov. 5.
This is the book I packed along to Malvern back in May, 1994, for the author's autograph and the first of two memorable luncheon afternoons Jo and I shared with the Sayers at "Hamewith," their home there. George picked us up at Malvern Link and showed us around. We visited Malvern Priory, with its Green Man amid the saints' bas-reliefs, Malvern College, and a favorite Inklings pub, whose overloud jukebox Aretha Franklin forced us to exit unpinted. At his home, across the road from the erstwhile estate of the "Pomp and Circumstance" composer Edward Elgar, he poured us amontillado, bade me sit down on the couch, and said, "That is just where Tolkien was sitting when I made those tapes you use in your Tolkien class."
At lunch, the conversation with Margaret and him was catholic in the literal sense, beginning with national health funding of artificial inseminating lesbians in the UK armed forces and moving to raising and butchering one's own vegetables and meat--they were vegetarians, we were not--to, of course, Tolkien and the Lewis brothers.
George and I shared admiration of W.H. Lewis' writing and I will always cherish his recollections of Warnie. Especially poignant was Warnie's refusal of Sayer's offer to treat him to a first trip to Versailles, the focus of his brilliant French histories of the era of Louis XIV, the Sun King, because, as George recalled, the Major felt Versailles would not live up to his image of it. At the end of that long and lively lunch--Margaret's table was grand as the Old Took's--I thanked him for his generosity to a couple of Midwestern Yanks, and he said something unforgettable:
"I don't much like America, but I find that I do like Americans."
The food and wines were superb, as they were again in 1996, when George provided me with some valuable insights on G.K. Chesterton's influence on Tolkien.
Both times we brought gold-foil coin-shaped chocolates for dessert and the best bottle of French red we could find at the Oddbins on the Broad in Oxford. We enjoyed the former together; they banked the latter in their thousand-bottle cellar. We left on the train back to Oxford both times feeling that these were indeed days to be marked with a white stone. So they have proved to be. The generosity, the cheer, and the lore and laughter we shared have warmed us with every recollection. I first met George at Wheaton College in 1978, when I thanked him for those 1952 home tape recordings of Tolkien. I have played these recordings a bit at a time for my Illinois Central College Tolkien class from its 1978 beginning to the present. Due to CD technology, one can now hear the occasional lorry passing outside and the clink of glasses. The beguiling power of the recording of Tolkien's reading of The Hobbit's riddle scene and the ride of the Rohirrim is one of George's many gifts to aural literature. We met again at the Tolkien Centenary at Keble College, Oxford, in 1992, first in the Keble bar after his paper and then enjoying dinner together with Margaret in the Keble dining hall. She and George were witty and well-matched.
Chris Mitchell and Marjorie Mead of Wheaton College's Wade Center had kept me informed of news of the Sayers since then, though it was I who broke the news of his passing to them All Hallows' Eve morning. On All Saints' Day on the telephone, we shared both our grief at his death and our joy of having shared in his life.
He was, as C.S. Lewis so famously and aptly wrote, "the most unselfish man." That he would offer both knowledge and hospitality to American strangers so liberally was ever thereafter an inspiration to me as a scholar and professor of English. As recently as Oct. 25 I thought of George, when Gilbert, the American Chesterton Society magazine, published a feature I wrote celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Return of the King. The essay recounted George's role in the publication of the The Lord of the Rings and included my acknowledgment. Quoting from it:

"In August, 1952, fourteen years after it was begun, The Lord of the Rings seemed doomed.
"Tolkien's long labor on "the new Hobbit" elicited rejection and, consequently, dejection. He'd abandoned hope it would ever be printed.
"Tape saved it.
"C.S. Lewis, Tolkien's friend, had loaned the typescript tale to George Sayer, a former pupil of both. Sayer and his wife Moira read it with enthusiastic admiration and invited Tolkien over to Malvern to retrieve the manuscript and stay for a few days of hobbitish picnicking, pubbing, and gardening before Michaelmas term. "For evening amusement, Sayer produced a tape recorder, the first Tolkien had seen. After exorcising the machine by recording the Lord's Prayer in Gothic, he taped some of the book's poems. "'The more he recorded, the more he enjoyed recording,' wrote Sayer. The riddle scene from The Hobbit followed. "I then asked him to record what he thought one of the best pieces of prose in The Lord of the Rings and he recorded [the last] part of 'The Ride of the Rohirrim.' "'Surely you know that's really good,' Sayer told him. Tolkien agreed. With Sayer's encouragement, he resubmitted it to publisher Rayner Unwin, who, in 1937 at age ten, had recommended The Hobbit for publication. Unwin believed The Lord of the Rings was a work of genius but uncertain of success. He risked it anyway, releasing it as three volumes not inexpensively priced 21 shillings each.
"The rest is literary history. October, 2005 marked the fiftieth anniversary of publication of its third and finest book, The Return of the King."
I meant to mail that to the Wade Center to pass along to George and Margaret, but it would have arrived too late for George, who was reading till the end of his days, in any event.
Dr. Mitchell and I eulogized George at the end of a panel discussion on the Tolkien-Lewis friendship at Belmont on Nov. 5. His more fulsome memorial will be published in the forthcoming issue of VII. He, Marjorie Mead, and others who knew George far better than Jo and I did share sadness over his passing. Yet we will recognize his laugh and his smile when we next encounter him.

Marjorie Mead wrote:
"Since the earliest days of the Wade Center, George Sayer has been a very special friend to Wheaton College. But more than that, he and his wife Margaret have been dear personal friends, and it is difficult to say just how much I grieve his death. Because of George and Margaret's warm hospitality, Malvern became almost a second home for me and my family. George was a kind, generous and loving friend. We miss him very much."