Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My cast away this week is the Reverend Rose Hudson Wilkin, the first black woman to be

chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen and to the Speaker of the House of Commons, she's also kept busy

with her work in less rarefied surroundings, ministering to two churches in East London in

the borough of Hackney. It's all a long way from the crystal waters and swaying

palms of Montego Bay, her birthplace, where brought up by Aunt Pet, she coped with

poverty and separation from her mother. But she did have a sense at the age of just

14 that her future lay in faith. She wasn't wrong. The combination of her belief and dynamism has taken her to the top, or at least as close to it as the Church of England will currently allow.

If they do eventually permit women bishops, it's easy to imagine that she'd be a shoe in she says oh I have

lots of ambition you can't be Jamaican and not be ambitious my ambition is to

enjoy life my ambition is to do everything I do to the best of my ability and

goodness knows Rose Hudson Wilkin it looks like you do a lot. When I think of your

life I imagine that you're just sort of rushing round London wrestling yourself in and out of

Chazebels and Cassucks and clerical blouses. Is that about right?

That sounds just about right. So many different jobs and today you are wearing something utterly splendid.

Would you describe it to me?

Yes, I'm wearing my red cassock as a chaplain to her majesty the Queen.

I'm entitled to wear red cassockock so I'm wearing that red today.

It looks utterly splendid and your professional life then takes you from Hackney as we know

to Royal Palaces to Westminster and the people that you're preaching to are in very different

...