Pembroke College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge,
England. The college is the third-oldest college of the university and has over
seven hundred students and fellows. Physically, it is one of the
university's larger colleges, with buildings from almost every century
since its founding, as well as extensive gardens.
As of 2014 the college has a financial endowment of £67 million. Pembroke has a
level of academic performance among the highest of all the Cambridge colleges;
in 2013 and 2014 Pembroke was placed second in the Tompkins Table.
Pembroke is home to the first chapel designed by Sir Christopher Wren and is
one of the 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, is endowed with an original copy of the
first encyclopaedia to contain printed diagrams.
The college's current master is Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury.
History 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, 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. Buildings
= Old Court= The first buildings comprised a single
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 required the grant
of a papal bull. The original court was the university's
smallest at only 95 feet by 55 feet, 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= 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 1875–6 by Alfred Waterhouse after he had declared the medieval Hall
unsafe. As well as the Hall, Waterhouse built a new range of rooms, Red
Buildings, in French Renaissance style, designed a new Master's Lodge on the
site of Paschal Yard, pulled down the old Lodge and the south range of Old
Court to open a vista to the Chapel, and finally built a new Library in the
continental Gothic style. 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 Psalm text "Nisi Dominus aedificat domum…".
Building work continued into the 20th century with W. D. Caröe as architect.
He added Pitt Building 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 Murrary Easton
replaced the Gothic tracery of the windows with a simpler design in the
style of the medieval Hall. 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.
= Gardens= Pembroke's enclosed grounds also house
some gardens, sporting vegetation. Highlights include "The Orchard", 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.
Student life Pembroke College has both graduate and
undergraduate students, termed Valencians, after the College's original
name. The undergraduate student body is represented by the Junior Parlour
Committee. The graduate community is represented by the Graduate Parlour
Committee. Pembroke is unusual in having its recreational rooms named as
"parlours" rather than the more standard "combination room".
There are many clubs and societies organised by the students of the
college, such as the boat club Pembroke College Boat Club and the college's
dramatic society the Pembroke Players, which has been made famous by alumni
such as Peter Cook, Eric Idle, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Clive James and Bill
Oddie and is now in its 60th year. International programmes
Pembroke is the only Cambridge college to have an International Programmes
Department, providing opportunities for international students to spend a
semester, 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 there are three programmes for British and international students:
the Pembroke-King's Programme, the International Security and Intelligence
Programme, and the Pembroke College-National Academy of Writing
Summer Programme. For the eight-week Pembroke-King’s Programme, as well as
the academic content, trips are made to locales such as London, and the
programme has a series of formal halls, which are described as "three-course
candlelit meals" serving "interesting" fare in Pembroke's historic dining hall.
The Pembroke-King's Programme is also the programme for which the prestigious
Thouron Prize is awarded, fully supporting nine American undergraduates
from Harvard, Yale, and UPenn. The International Security and Intelligence
and Creative Writing programmes are four-week programmes open to
undergraduates, graduates and professionals.
People associated with Pembroke Institutions named after the college
Pembroke College, 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
alumnus Roger Williams, a co-founder of Rhode Island.
In 1981, a decade after the merger of Pembroke College into Brown University,
the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women was named in honour of
Pembroke College and the history of women's efforts to gain access to higher
education. See also
List of Masters of Pembroke College, Cambridge
Category:Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge
Pembroke College Boat Club List of organ scholars
References External links
Pembroke College website