Pembroke College Chapel

We are delighted to announce that Professor Polly Blakesley will be the next Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. She will take up office on 1st October 2025 following the retirement of Lord Smith of Finsbury, who has been Master since 2015.

Polly Blakesley has been a Fellow of Pembroke since 2002 and took up a Professorship in Russian and European Art in 2018. A prize-winning historian of the visual culture of imperial Russia and the Baltic region, she has served on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Kettle’s Yard, and is now a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Samuel Courtauld Trust.

Professor Blakesley says, “It is an honour to take on this role at a pivotal moment in Pembroke’s history, as we celebrate the completion of Dolby Court and realise the extraordinary potential of the Mill Lane project for Pembroke as a whole. I look forward to serving the College’s many communities as we sustain our commitment to excellence and diversity and embrace the opportunities ahead.”

Photo: Beth Prodger Photography

Join us tonight for our penultimate Sunday Evensong of term. Lucy Walker 'My heart, O God'; the premiere of a new set of responses written by one of our basses, Rhys King; Stanford in A and Bainton 'And I saw a new heaven'. 6pm - all welcome!

This coming Sunday we're delighted to welcome Pembroke's Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe to be our guest speaker at Evensong. It is Refugee Sunday in Chapel, a day when we pay particular attention, in word and prayer, to the plight of refugees around the world and in the UK. The Lampedusa Cross will be moved to the centre of Chapel. The service is at 6pm and all are warmly welcome.

Earlier on Sunday at the 10.15am Eucharist one of our final year students will be preaching, do come along and support him as he takes to the lectern for the first time.

Slightly relieved to see we are now a “top fan” of Pembroke College Cambridge 😅😇🎉

On Sunday our Evensong preacher is the Rev'd Canon Dr Rob Mackley Rob is the vicar of Little St Mary's, just across the road from Pembroke.

At the 10.15am Eucharist we are delighted to welcome a Pembroke Student to preach, so do come along and support her as she addresses our morning congregation.

There is no Wednesday Evensong this week. Please do join us for Compline at 9.30pm, however!

Today we remember St Augustine of Canterbury, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory in 597 to bear witness to the good news of Jesus Christ.

Welcomed by the Christian Queen, he met the King of thee Cantuarbrigii and his family who became Christians and were baptised, became the first Archbishop of Canterbury, and was the founder of the Latin church in Britain, complementing the work of the Celtic churches in the north.

He brought with him the Canterbury Gospels, which were carried in the procession at the Coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla last year. He died on 26 May 604. We gratefully remember his faithful witness, his courage and his sacrifice.

Join us next Tuesday 28th as Pembroke alumnus David Galbraith Woods (m. 1962!) leads the newly formed Pembroke Baroque ensemble in a concert celebrating the connection between Pembroke College and the eighteenth-century academic Dr William Boyce.

Begins at 6:30pm in Pembroke Chapel.

Join us for Evensong tonight at 6pm! The choir will be singing Lucy Walker's O Nata Lux, the McDowall responses, Leighton 2nd service, & Martin I saw the Lord. All are welcome!

The Bible in our chapel — the Authorised Version, as you would expect at Lancelot Andrewe’s college, in two leather-bound volumes — was given in memory of Sir Sydney Castle Roberts, Master of Pembroke College Cambridge and Vice-Chancellor of University of Cambridge

Happy Hanukkah to all keeping this festival of light and dedication.

Join us on Thursday to light the Menorah on the first night of Chanukah 🕎

📆 Thursday 7 December, 5pm
📌 Alison Richard Building, Sidgwick Site, 7 West Road
🕍 Hosted by Chabad of Cambridge
🍩 Doughnuts and hot chocolate

You can help churches share God’s love around the world this Christmas through the Anglican Communion Fund’s Big Give .

Through your giving last year, the ACF supported the Anglican Church in Kenya in planting for a sustainable future. Training was provided to local church leaders and climate champions to implement a Communion Forest Project, preserving biodiversity and improving ecosystems in the wake of deforestation. Education was also provided in schools and churches to encourage care for creation – which is more important now than ever.

Until noon tomorrow, each donation will be doubled. Show your support: https://bit.ly/3uGwF5S

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. It marks the beginning of a season of waiting, a dark season of longing for the lights and warmth of Christmas.

We find waiting very difficult.

Waiting confronts the illusion that we are in control. It’s very easy to believe this in our modern world, where technology provides us with any information we can dream of instantly, where our infrastructure and modern medicine insulates us from our precariousness and fragility.

Waiting reminds us of our powerlessness in our lives in so many ways. We recognise our inability to predict the future, to know the outcome of situations we long to see resolved.

To realise we are not in control of our lives can feel hugely shocking and destabilising. And yet at Advent, we reflect on the fact that the one we are waiting for is the one who we can ask to be in control of our lives.

This one does not come with power and fire. He will come, as Rowan Williams writes in his marvellous poem ‘Advent Calendar’, ‘like crying in the night, like blood, like breaking, as the earth writhes to toss him free. He will come like child.’

I pray that this Advent, you may release all that you are waiting for into the arms of the babe in the manger. In His presence, may our waiting finally cease.

We had such a wonderful evening of music at Pembroke House (founded by Pembroke College Cambridge students 130+ years ago in Walworth, South London), with The Choirs of Pembroke College, Cambridge

If you’re in London today, be sure join us at Pembroke House for a 6pm Advent Carols by Candlelight service with The Choirs of Pembroke College, Cambridge

Wonderful to have Dr Gardom at the annual Dean’s Christmas Party to regale us again with the 🦛 Hippopotamus Song!

Many carol services later and the end is nearly in sight…! Join us tonight at 7pm for our Christmas Concert - Christmas classics alongside Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb - free admission! We hope to see you there ❤️🐱

Over the next several days, young people will be arriving at Pembroke College Cambridge for their interviews. Please do hold them, and all who support them, in your prayers — along with all those in College involved in the interviews process.

After the Master’s Fireworks at the end of the Pembroke College Cambridge Christmas Formal, we all gathered at Pembroke College Chapel to sing Christmas music with the The Choirs of Pembroke College, Cambridge. What a wonderful community!

It may not be midwinter yet but certainly this morning at Pembroke College Cambridge ‘Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone’ on our way to Morning Prayer on the penultimate day of Term

The sons of Colin Wilcockson (1970) are arranging a reprint of a fascinating miscellany of Colin's writing - criticism, prose fiction and poetry (table of contents below) - which they originally produced and printed in a very limited edition in their father’s honour in 2020.

If you would like to order a copy, for £20 + p&p (any profit will go to Pembroke House), or indeed more than one copy, please complete the online form below by the end of tomorrow, Thursday 30 November.

https://forms.office.com/e/DJmkijdJKZ

Table of contents:

The Clerk of Oxford
The Breviary of Marie de St Pol, Countess of Pembroke
Reunions
William Langland
The Summer-garden
From Notes on Some Letters of David Jones
From 'Thou' and 'Ye' in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale
Illustrations in Works of Literature
Sagittarius: Archer of the Year's End
From The Woodbind and the Nightingale Images in Troilus and Criseyde Books II and III
Father-Directors, Daughter-Performers in Shakespeare
Letters from a Stranger
From Self-presentation in In Parenthesis
Two Villanelles Inspired by William Drummond
From The Puppy in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess
'Breaking the ice': Antedating the Oxford English Dictionary
Job's Wife
The Book of the Duchess
From Mythological References in Two Painted Inscriptions of David Jones
Roman Road
From The Opening of Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: a Diptych
The Art of Love
From Some Problems in Translating Chaucer's Poetry into Modern Prose
Alpha & Omega
From The Harrowing of Hell Motif in Shakespeare's Macbeth
Safe Custody
From Ted Hughes' Undergraduate Years at Pembroke College, Cambridge: Some Myths Demystified
Through a Glass Darkly
From The Seven Deadly Sins
Two Sonnets
From Illustrating Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: Eric Gill's Woodcuts for the Golden Cockerell Press
The Manuscript
'One foot in the grave': Antedating the Oxford English Dictionary
From Glutton's Black Mass in Piers Plowman
Jubilate Agno: Two Villanelles to Commemorate Christopher Smart
Two Moral Tales: The Nun's Priest's Tale and The Pardoner's Tale
From David Jones and 'The Break'
Travelling with Botticelli: A Journey of Discovery from Intellect to Senses
Poste restante

The chapel of course is open — but our regular choral services are done for the Term. See you in the New Year! (And at Saturday’s 7pm choir concert)