Educated at Truro College, the Leys School and Cambridge (Gonville and Caius College) he was ordained a priest at the age of twenty-six and appointed Curate of St Andrew’s Church in  Plymouth.  An army chaplain in the First World War, he became Dean of Chapel at Gonville and Caius before becoming Archdeacon of Coventry and Honorary Chaplain to King George V.

Consecrated a bishop by Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, on June 11th, 1935 Hunkin was a committed evangelical and was noted for his pastoral work, chairing a commission (1948 – 1950) to produce a new English translation of the Bible.  

Hunkin’s pastoral staff comprised the traditional, bishop’s, shepherd’s crook of iron with a wooden shaft which was bound with a silver band inscribed ‘Un para, un bugel’ (Cornish for ‘One flock, one shepherd’). 

He was a notable theologian whose most important works include ‘Is it Reasonable to Believe?’ (1935) and ‘From a Cornish Bishop’s Garden’ (2001) the latter being a collection of his writings for the weekly Anglican newspaper, The Guardian, (not today’s national newspaper).