Pembroke College, Cambridge

Pembroke College
University of Cambridge
Old Court, Pembroke College
Arms of Pembroke College, Cambridge: Arms of Valence (Barry (of ten) argent and azure, an orle of French martlets gules) dimidiating St Pol (Châtillon): (Gules, three pales vair a chief or with a label of three points azure for difference)
Scarf colours: dark blue, with two equally-spaced narrow Cambridge blue stripes
Location	Trumpington Street (map)
Coordinates	52.202°N 0.120°E / 52.202; 0.120
Full name	The College or Hall of Valence Mary (commonly called Pembroke College) in the University of Cambridge
Abbreviation	PEM
Founder	Marie de St Pol, Countess of Pembroke
Established	1347 (1347)
Named after	Aymer de Valence, 2nd Earl of Pembroke
Previous names	Marie Valence Hall (1347–?) Pembroke Hall (?–1856)
Sister college	The Queen's College, Oxford
Master	The Lord Smith of Finsbury
Undergraduates	484 (2022-23)
Postgraduates	282 (2022-23)
Endowment	£139.0m (2023)
Website	www.pem.cam.ac.uk
JP	pemjp.soc.srcf.net
GP	pemgp.soc.srcf.net
Boat club	www.pembrokecollegeboatclub.com
Map
Location in Central Cambridge Location in Cambridge

Pembroke College (officially "The Master, Fellows and Scholars of the College or Hall of Valence-Mary") is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college is the third-oldest college of the university and has over 700 students and fellows. It is one of the university's larger colleges, with buildings from almost every century since its founding, as well as extensive gardens. Its members are termed "Valencians". The college's current master is Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury.

Pembroke has a level of academic performance among the highest of all the Cambridge colleges; in 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2018 Pembroke was placed second in the Tompkins Table. Pembroke contains the first chapel designed by Sir Christopher Wren and is one of only six Cambridge colleges to have educated a British prime minister, in Pembroke's case William Pitt the Younger. The college library, with a Victorian neo-gothic clock tower, has an original copy of the first encyclopaedia to contain printed diagrams.

History

Engraving of Marie de St Pol, foundress of Pembroke College, Cambridge

Marie de St Pol, Countess of Pembroke (1303–1377), a member of the de Châtillon family of France, founded Pembroke College, Cambridge. On Christmas Eve 1347, Edward III granted Marie de St Pol, widow of the Earl of Pembroke, the licence for the foundation of a new educational establishment in the young university at Cambridge. The Hall of Valence Mary ("Custos & Scolares Aule Valence Marie in Cantebrigg'"), as it was originally known, was thus founded to house a body of students and fellows. The statutes were notable in that they both gave preference to students born in France who had already studied elsewhere in England, and that they required students to report fellow students if they indulged in excessive drinking or visited disreputable houses.

The college was later renamed Pembroke Hall, and finally became Pembroke College in 1856.

Marie was closely involved with College affairs in the 30 years until her death and burial at Denny Abbey, to the north of Cambridge, in 1377. She seems to have been something of a disciplinarian: the original Foundation documents had strict penalties for drunkenness and lechery, required that all students' debts were settled within two weeks of the end of term, and gave strict limits on numbers at graduation parties.

In 2015, the college received a bequest of £34 million from the estate of American inventor and Pembroke alumnus Ray Dolby, thought to be the largest single donation to a college in the history of Cambridge University.

Buildings

Old Court

Bird's eye view of Pembroke College, Cambridge by David Loggan, published in 1690.

The first buildings comprised a single court (now called Old Court) containing all the component parts of a college – chapel, hall, kitchen and buttery, master's lodgings, students' rooms – and the statutes provided for a manciple, a cook, a barber and a laundress. Both the founding of the college and the building of the city's first college Chapel (1355) required the grant of a papal bull.

The original court was the university's smallest at only 95 feet (29 m) by 55 feet (17 m), but was enlarged to its current size in the nineteenth century by demolishing the south range.

The college's gatehouse is the oldest in Cambridge.

Chapel

Pembroke College chapel interior in September 2014

The original Chapel now forms the Old Library and has a striking seventeenth-century plaster ceiling, designed by Henry Doogood, showing birds flying overhead. Around the Civil War, one of Pembroke's fellows and Chaplain to the future Charles I, Matthew Wren, was imprisoned by Oliver Cromwell. On his release after eighteen years, he fulfilled a promise by hiring his nephew Christopher Wren to build a great Chapel in his former college. The resulting Chapel was consecrated on St Matthew's Day, 1665, and the eastern end was extended by George Gilbert Scott in 1880, when it was consecrated on the Feast of the Annunciation.

Expansion

An increase in membership over the last 150 years saw a corresponding increase in building activity. The Hall was rebuilt in 1875–1876 to designs by Alfred Waterhouse after he had declared the medieval Hall unsafe. As well as the Hall, Waterhouse designed a new range of rooms, Red Buildings (1871–1872), in French Renaissance style, designed a new Master's Lodge on the site of Paschal Yard (1873, later to become N staircase), pulled down the old Lodge and the south range of Old Court to open a vista to the chapel, and finally designed a new Library (1877–1878) in the continental Gothic style. The construction of the new library was undertaken by Rattee and Kett.

Waterhouse was dismissed as architect in 1878 and succeeded by George Gilbert Scott, who, after extending the chapel, provided additional accommodation with the construction of New Court in 1881, with letters on a series of shields along the string course above the first floor spelling out the text from Psalm 127:1, "Nisi Dominus aedificat domum…" ("Except the Lord build the house, their labour is but vain that build it").

Building work continued into the 20th century with W. D. Caröe as architect. He added Pitt Building (M staircase) between Ivy Court and Waterhouse's Lodge, and extended New Court with the construction of O staircase on the other side of the Lodge. He linked his two buildings with an arched stone screen, Caröe Bridge, along Pembroke Street in a late Baroque style, the principal function of which was to act as a bridge by which undergraduates might cross the Master's forecourt at first-floor level from Pitt Building to New Court without leaving the college or trespassing in what was then the Fellows' Garden.

In 1926, as the Fellows had become increasingly disenchanted with Waterhouse's Hall, Maurice Webb was brought in to remove the open roof, put in a flat ceiling and add two storeys of sets above. The wall between the Hall and the Fellows' Parlour was taken down, and the latter made into a High Table dais. A new Senior Parlour was then created on the ground floor of Hitcham Building. The remodelling work was completed in 1949 when Murray Easton replaced the Gothic tracery of the windows with a simpler design in the style of the medieval Hall.

Library Court

In 1933 Maurice Webb built a new Master's Lodge in the south-east corner of the College gardens, on land acquired from Peterhouse in 1861. Following the war, further accommodation was created with the construction in 1957 of Orchard Building, so called because it stands on part of the Foundress's orchard. Finally, in a move to accommodate the majority of junior members on the College site rather than in hostels in the town, in the 1990s Eric Parry designed a new range of buildings on the site of the Master's Lodge, with a new Lodge at the west end. "Foundress Court" was opened in 1997 in celebration of the college's 650th Anniversary. In 2001 the Library was extended to the east and modified internally.

In 2017, Pembroke College launched a new campaign of extension called the "Time and The Place" (or the Mill Lane project), on the other side of Trumpington Street. The project is to enlarge the size of the college by a third, with new social spaces, rooms and offices.

Gardens

Pembroke's enclosed grounds include garden areas. Highlights include "The Orchard" (a patch of semi-wild ground in the centre of the college), an impressive row of Plane Trees and a bowling green, re-turfed in 1996, which is reputed to be among the oldest in continual use in Europe.

Gallery

• 
  The Croquet Lawn in New Court, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott
• 
  The Trumpington Street Façade with the College Chapel on the right, the first building to be built by Sir Christopher Wren
• 
  The Gatehouse is the oldest in Cambridge, dating from the 14th century
• 
  Dining Hall

Coat of arms

The arms of Pembroke College were officially recorded in 1684. The formal blazon combines the arms of De Valence (bars), dimidiated with the arms of St. Pol (vair). It is described as :

Barry of ten argent and azure, an orle of five martlets gules dimidiated with paly vair and gules, on a chief Or a label of five points throughout azure.

Traditions

Pembroke holds Formal Hall 4 evenings a week depending on their qualifications: a separate Hall is held for BA students. Students of the college must wear gowns and arrive on time for Latin Grace, which starts the dinner. Like many Cambridge colleges, Pembroke also has an annual May Ball.

According to popular legends, Pembroke is inhabited by ghosts occupying the Ivy Court.

Student life

Pembroke's boathouse on the River Cam

Pembroke College has both graduate and undergraduate students, termed Valencians, after the college's original name, and its recreational rooms named as "parlours" rather than the more standard "combination room". The undergraduate student body is represented by the Junior Parlour Committee (JPC). The graduate community is represented by the Graduate Parlour Committee (GPC). In March 2016, the Junior Parlour Committee was featured in national newspapers after it cancelled the theme of an "Around The World in 80 Days" dance party.

There are many sports and societies organised by members of the college. Amongst the most established are Pembroke College Boat Club and the Pembroke Players, the college's dramatic society which has been made famous by alumni including Peter Cook, Eric Idle, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Clive James and Bill Oddie, and is now in its 67th year. Pembroke College Association Football Club (PCAFC) and Women's Association Football Club (PCWAFC) compete separately in collegiate competitions. Chrembroke Hockey Club (PCHC) compete jointly with Christ's College, and Pirton RUFC, the rugby union team, are merged with Girton College.

Female undergraduates were first admitted to the college in 1984.

International programmes

Pembroke is the only Cambridge college to have an International Programmes Department, providing opportunities for international students to spend a semester (mid-January to mid-June), or part of the summer, in Cambridge. The Spring Semester Programme is a competitive programme for academically outstanding students who wish to follow a regular Cambridge degree course as fully matriculated members of the University. There are around thirty places each year.

In the summer the college offers the eight-week Pembroke Cambridge Summer Programme. As well as the academic content, trips are made to locales such as London, and the programme has a series of formal halls and events such as croquet matches and punting on the River Cam. This is also the programme for which the prestigious Thouron Prize is awarded, fully supporting nine American undergraduates from Harvard, Yale, and UPenn. In addition, there is the Pembroke College, Cambridge 1976 Scholarship, awarded to three outstanding undergraduates from the University of California.

People associated with Pembroke

See also the categories Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge and Alumni of Pembroke College, Cambridge

For a more comprehensive list, see List of Masters of Pembroke College, Cambridge and List of Honorary Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

• 
  Nicholas Ridley, English Protestant cleric and martyr
• 
  Edmund Spenser, the Elizabethan poet remembered for his epic poem The Faerie Queene
• 
  Lancelot Andrewes, English bishop and translator
• 
  Roger Williams, Baptist theologian, founder of Rhode Island
• 
  William Pitt the Younger, the youngest ever British Prime Minister
• 
  Sir George Gabriel Stokes, Lucasian Professor, a mathematician and physicist
• 
  Rab Butler, British Politician
• 
  Abba Eban, Israeli Foreign Minister and VP of the United Nations General Assembly
• 
  Harold Bloom, literary critic
• 
  Peter Cook, British comedian
• 
  John Sulston, British biologist and Nobel Prize Winner
• 
  Eric Idle, British comedian and writer, Monty Python member
• 
  Naomie Harris, British actress
• 
  Tom Hiddleston, British actor

Name	Birth	Death	Occupation
Trevor Allan	1955		Noted legal philosopher
Lancelot Andrewes	1555	1626	Master; Dean of Westminster; Bishop of Chichester, Ely, Winchester; leading member of the translation committee which produced the King James Bible
C.F. Andrews	1871	1940	Priest and activist for the Indian independence movement
David Armitage Bannerman	1886	1979	Ornithologist
Robert Bathurst	1957		Actor
Richard Beard (author)	1967		Novelist and non-fiction writer
Clive Betts	1950		British politician
John Bradford	1510	1550	Fellow, prebendary of St. Paul's, Martyr
Peter Bradshaw	1962		Author and film critic
Tim Brooke-Taylor	1940	2020	Comedian, member of The Goodies
Marcus Buckingham	1966		Award-winning author and motivational speaker
William Burkitt	1650	1703	New Testament commentator, vicar and lecturer of Dedham, Essex
Roger Bushell	1910	1944	Leader of "The Great Escape"
Rab Butler	1902	1982	British politician; served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister.
Christopher Clark	1960		Regius Professor of History, University of Cambridge.
Peter Cook	1937	1995	Comedian
Jo Cox	1974	2016	British aid worker and politician.
Richard Crashaw	c.1613	1649	Anglican cleric and later Catholic convert, poet associated with Metaphysical poets and religious poetry, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge
William Crashaw	1572	1626	Appointed preacher at the Inner Temple, Anglican divine and poet, author of anti-Catholic tracts and pamphlets
Seamus Deane	1940	2021	Novelist, poet and literary critic
Maurice Dobb	1900	1976	Economist
Simon Donaldson	1957		Mathematician; Fields Medallist (1986)
Ray Dolby	1933	2013	Inventor who bequeathed US$52.6 million to Pembroke
C. H. Douglas	1879	1952	Engineer; pioneer of the Social Credit movement
Timothy Dudley-Smith	1926	2024	Hymn writer and clergyman of the Church of England
Abba Eban	1915	2002	Statesman; President of the Weizmann Institute of Science
Rick Edwards	1979		Television presenter
Edward James Eliot	1758	1797	British politician
William Eliot, 2nd Earl of St Germans	1767	1845	British politician
Archibald Fargus	1878	1963	Cricketer, scholar, clergyman
Femi Fani-Kayode	1960		Former Nigerian Minister of Culture and Tourism
Roger W. Ferguson Jr.	1951		Economist, Vice Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, President and CEO of TIAA, Honorary Fellow
Ian Fleming	1935		Organic chemist, emeritus professor of the University of Cambridge and emeritus fellow
William Fowler	1911	1995	Nobel prize winner for Physics
Arthur Gilligan	1894	1976	England cricket captain
Alexander Grantham	1899	1978	Governor of Fiji, later Governor of Hong Kong
Thomas Gray	1716	1771	Poet
Stephen Greenblatt	1943		Literary critic, pioneer of New Historicism
Bendor Grosvenor	1977		Art historian
Malcolm Guite	1957		Poet and author (Sounding the Seasons, The Singing Bowl), priest, singer-songwriter, currently Bye-Fellow and Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge; BA, MA, 1980.
Rupert Gwynne	1871	1924	Member of Parliament (MP) for Eastbourne 1910–1924.
Naomie Harris	1976		Actress
Tom Harrisson	1911	1976	Ornithologist, anthropologist, soldier, co-founder of Mass-Observation
Samuel Harsnett	1561	1631	Master, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, later Archbishop of York and theological writer
Oliver Heald	1954		British politician
Tom Hiddleston	1981		Actor
Philip Hinchcliffe	1944		Television producer
Ted Hughes	1930	1998	Poet
Eric Idle	1943		Comedian, member of Monty Python
Clive James	1939	2019	Critic, journalist and broadcaster
Atma Jayaram	1915	1990	Former Director of the Indian Intelligence Bureau
Peter Jeffrey	1929	1999	Actor
Humphrey Jennings	1907	1950	Film-maker
Bryan Keith-Lucas	1912	1996	Political scientist
Emma Johnson	1966		Clarinettist
Leslie Peter Johnson	1930	2016	Germanist
Anna Lapwood	1995		Organist, conductor and broadcaster
Robert Macfarlane	1976		Writer
David MacMyn	1903	1978	Rugby union international (Scotland and Lions) player and administrator
Sir Henry James Sumner Maine	1822	1888	Jurist and Historian
Peter May	1929	1994	Cricketer
Simon McDonald	1961		Diplomat, Head of the British Diplomatic Service
D. H. Mellor	1938	2020	Philosopher
Messenger Monsey	1694	1788	Physician
Tom Morris	1964		Theatre director and producer
Sir Allan Mossop	1887	1965	Chief Judge of the British Supreme Court for China
David Munrow	1942	1976	Musician, composer, music historian
Richard Murdoch	1907	1990	Actor, comedian
Bill Oddie	1941		Comedian, member of The Goodies, ornithologist
William Pitt	1759	1806	British politician; Prime Minister 1783–1801, 1804–06
Rodney Porter	1917	1985	Nobel prize winning Biochemist
George Maxwell Richards	1931	2018	President of Trinidad and Tobago
Nicholas Ridley	c. 1502	1555	Bishop of London, Martyr
Quintin Riley	1905	1980	Arctic explorer
Edmund Grindal	c. 1519	1571	Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop of York, Bishop of London
Michael Rowan-Robinson	1942		Astronomer and astrophysicist
Martin Rowson	1959		Cartoonist
Hugh Ruttledge	1884	1961	Mountaineer
Tom Sharpe	1928	2013	Novelist
Indra Sinha	1950		Novelist
Christopher Smart	1722	1771	Poet, hymnist, journalist, actor
Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury	1951		British politician; current Master
Edmund Spenser	1552	1599	Poet
George Gabriel Stokes	1819	1903	Mathematician, physicist
John Sulston	1942		Chemist, Nobel prize winner
Peter Taylor, Baron Taylor of Gosforth	1930	1997	Lord Chief Justice
Peter Taylor	1942		Author and journalist
Karan Thapar	1955		Writer, journalist, broadcaster, editor
William Turner	1508	1568	Physician
P. K. van der Byl	1923	1999	Rhodesian politician
Lawrence Wager	1904	1965	Geologist, explorer and mountaineer
Wavell Wakefield, 1st Baron Wakefield of Kendal	1898	1983	Rugby player
Leonard Whibley	1864	1941	Greek scholar
David White	1961		Garter Principal King of Arms
Yorick Wilks	1939		Computer scientist, professor of artificial intelligence
Roger Williams	1603	1683	Statesman, theologian, founder of Rhode Island
George Crichton Wells	1914	1999	Dermatologist, first described Well's syndrome
Ed Yong	1981		Science journalist and author
Timothy Winter	1960		Academic, theologian and Islamic scholar

Institutions named after the college

Pembroke College in Brown University, located in Providence, Rhode Island

Pembroke College in Brown University, the former women's college at Brown University in the United States, was named for the principal building on the women's campus, Pembroke Hall, which was itself named in honour of the Pembroke College (Cambridge) alumnus Roger Williams, a co-founder of Rhode Island.

In 1865 Pembroke College, Cambridge donated land for the formation of the Suffolk memorial to Prince Albert. The land at Framlingham in the county of Suffolk was used to build a school, The Albert Memorial College. The school today is known as Framlingham College and one of its seven houses is named Pembroke House in recognition of the contribution Pembroke College has made to the school.

In 1981, a decade after the merger of Pembroke College into Brown University, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women there was named in honour of Pembroke College and the history of women's efforts to gain access to higher education.

See also

World War I Memorial

• Category:Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge
• List of organ scholars

External links

• Pembroke College website