According to a death notice in The West Briton 19 August 1831:[1] "At Penzance on Thursday the 11th instant, Mr Dunking, [died] aged 70 years.
– This most respectable man was a member of the Society of Friends; he was originally a saddler, which business he long carried on; but he was also an excellent mathematical instrument maker, and was well known to men of science by some valuable improvements in the barometer and the thermometer.
He was an able mathematician, and in natural philosophy, especially in electricity and magnetism, he was deeply skilled – His amiable disposition, and the unassuming manners so well suited to his religious opinions, secured him the respect of all who knew him and will long endear his memory to his numerous friends."
[2] On 20 January 1786 Robert Dunkin and Celia Bonello, a widow, daughter of William and Elizabeth Odgers of Helston, were married, after the manner of Quakers.
[13] She contests the idea that Davy was a "country bumpkin", giving evidence that he and his family were of middling status in Penzance society:[14] "Intimated always, in Paris's descriptive flights, were notes of snobbish disdain".
[19] Robert Hunt, in his article in Dictionary of National Biography (1888) on Davy,[20] says: "....These conditions developed a love of poetry and the composition of verses and ballads.
This was mainly due to a member of the Society of Friends named Robert Dunkin, a saddler; a man of original mind and of the most varied acquirements.
Dunkin constructed for himself an electrical machine, voltaic piles, and Leyden jars, and made models illustrative of the principles of mechanics.
Fullmer cites[23] the first documented contact was Davy's written attack on "The pretended inspiration of Quakers and other sectaries",[24] the continuation of an oral debate.