Tributes to former Pontefract archdeacon Kenneth Unwin

Ken was educated at Chesterfield Grammar School and St Edmunds College, Oxford. He served as a curate in Leeds and Durham and as a vicar in the parishes of Dodworth, Royston and St John’s, Wakefield.

He represented the Wakefield diocese on the General Synod and was a Rural Dean in the Wakefield Diocese and an Honorary Canon of Wakefield Cathedral.

He was appointed Archdeacon of Pontefract in 1982 and continued in that role until his retirement in 1992. He also served as a school governor and as a member of the Wakefield education committee.

His home was always a place of warmth and sanctuary whether to itinerant homeless people, to parishioners experiencing personal crisis, bereavement or loneliness, or to international police officers from as far afield as Fiji and the Solomon Islands who had been sent to Wakefield to undertake training.

In the 1980s, he travelled to the Diocese of Mara, in Tanzania, East Africa, to support his colleague Bill Jones who had been seconded there from the Diocese of Wakefield.

He was involved in setting up a school and health centre in a village on the edge of the Serengeti – a link with the Wakefield district that is still active 30 years later.

Ken’s late wife Beryl died in 2017 and he is succeeded by his four daughters and a son. At the time of his death he had 17 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren with two more great-grandchildren due imminently.