Religion: Truro's Hunkin

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A bulwark of low churchmen in the Episcopal and Anglican churches is the Evangelical Education Society. Last week there arrived in Manhattan a great Anglican evangelical, Rt. Rev. Joseph Wellington Hunkin, 50, Lord Bishop of Truro, scheduled to be chief speaker at the society's 75th anniversary meeting in Philadelphia this week. An able pulpit orator, Dr. Hunkin will spend a month in the U.S., preach in Episcopal churches and seminaries in Detroit, Boston, Washington, Richmond.

Born in Truro, Joseph Hunkin studied mathematics and tutored at Cambridge's Gonville & Caius College (pronounced and called "Keys"; the Gonville is usually silent) before he went into the Church. During the War he was chaplain of the 29th Division, British Expeditionary Force, won his Military Cross for working among wounded soldiers at the front after being twice gassed. Shy, bespectacled little Dr. Hunkin later became dean of "Keys," was appointed Bishop of Truro in 1935. His diocese embraces the county of Cornwall, four parishes in Devonshire and the windswept Scilly Isles off Land's End. Year ago this Lord Bishop did something none of his predecessors had ever tried. He took a boat to a lighthouse in the Isles, let himself be hauled up, his clerical apron flapping and his gaitered legs dangling, from the boiling seas to the lighthouse door (see cut). There he confirmed four isolated islanders in the Church of England's faith.