Ion Keith-Falconer
Ion Grant Neville Keith-Falconer was a Scottish missionary and Arabic scholar, the third son of the 8th Earl of Kintore.
Keith-Falconer was born in Edinburgh. After attending Harrow School and studying at the University of Cambridge, he moved into evangelistic work in London. In 1886, he was appointed Arabic professor at Cambridge, but his career was cut short near Aden while in missionary work. He translated the Fables of Bidpaï. He was an athlete, a champion cyclist and is described as a world cycling champion in 1878.
Background
Keith-Falconer was the third son of the Earl of Kintore and shared his childhood between the ancestral home in Scotland and Brighton on the southern English coast. In 1869, when he was 13, he succeeded in obtaining a place, through examination, at Harrow School, then in countryside north-west of London. He took notes of his lessons in shorthand, which he had taught himself.Keith-Falconer left Harrow in 1873, having acquired a tutor to teach him mathematics, studying with the Rev Lewis Hensley at his vicarage in Hitchin. As well as trigonometry and algebra and other subjects which seem not to have interested him particularly, he continued cycling and learned to sing. "This," said Hensley, was "for the promotion of the Temperance cause, to which he devoted himself by assisting in the entertainments and addresses of a Temperance Brigade of young men."
Keith-Falconer went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in September 1874. He lived at 21 Market Hill until he married.
He finished his graduate studies with a First and began to read for honours in theological tripos.
Cycling
A teacher at Harrow School, E. E. Bowen, said:The cycling historian Jim McGurn said:
It was while at Cambridge – where he was elected vice-president of the university bicycle club on 6 June 1874 – that he won his first bicycle races. In a letter to his sister-in-law on 11 November 1874, he wrote:
In 1875, he won a club race over the from Hatfield to Cambridge, and on 10 May won a race against Oxford University from St Albans to Oxford,. The following April he won a four-mile race, described as "the amateur championship", at Lillie Bridge, setting a record time. On 15 May he won the Cambridge club's race at Fenner's in 3h 20m 37s.
On 11 May 1878 he won the National Cyclists' Union two-mile championship at Stamford Bridge. It was probably this race that gave him the status of world champion. Until the creation of the International Cycling Association, the NCU's championships were considered the unofficial championships of the world.
In 1882, Keith-Falconer rode from Land's End to John o' Groats, the length of Britain, in 13 days. He rode in his last two days. His last race of importance was the amateur championship on 29 July 1882, at Crystal Palace, outside London. He won, seven minutes better than the record, in 2h 43m 58s.
On 28 May 1881, Keith-Falconer went cycle-touring through Oxford, Pangbourne and Harrow, a warm-up to his Land's End – John o'Groats ride, that started on 4 June. Riding from one end of Britain to the other was, in the 19th century, a journey of poor or unmade roads, riding a high-wheeled bicycle with precarious balance and poor brakes. It demanded good weather. When it did not come, Keith-Falconer left Penzance after four days and returned to London and Cambridge.
Keith-Falconer's views on cycling were not always those shared by cyclists of lesser opportunity. On 20 August 1881 he wrote to his friend Mr Charrington, with whom he worked in the East End of London :
Early evangelism
The area outside Cambridge known as Barnwell was then a rough area inhabited largely by labourers working on the railways, of which four competing lines met in Cambridge. Others worked in the fossil beds. Robert Sinker, Keith-Falconer's biographer, said the labourers were "mostly poor and ignorant, including even yet a large number of persons following vicious courses; and while the Gospel teaching of a band of devoted men was gradually leavening the mass, yet while the workers were slowly gaining on the task which faced them, hundreds were dying."Keith-Falconer threw himself with others in May 1875 into a missionary project for the area. They hired a theatre and held preaching meetings there for a month. "All this time," Sinker said, "Keith-Falconer was a steady and consistent helper of the mission, by his purse, by his personal cooperation, and we may feel sure by his prayers." At the end of the month, they judged their work a success and repeated the process for three and a half years at the Ragged School, in New Street. There, Sinker said:
Keith-Falconer lectured this audience on Zelophehad's daughters.
The theatre in Barnwell became available in autumn 1878 and the evangelists acquired it, although outbid at the auction. Keith-Falconer was also involved in acquisition of the Great Assembly Hall in Mile End Road, in the East End of London. Here, the Tower Hamlets Mission was established. The state of the area is summarised by this account:
Arab interests
Keith-Falconer taught himself Hebrew at Harrow and then moved on to other Semitic languages. At Cambridge he studied for a Semitic languages tripos, studying Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac. He required a deep knowledge of the Hebrew Bible. He passed.Keith-Falconer continued his study of Arabic in Germany, as much to perfect speaking German as deepen his knowledge of Arabia. He stayed at Leipzig for five months of 1881. That year he met General Gordon, who on 25 April 1881 wrote to him from Southampton:
In October, Keith-Falconer left for Assiout, 350 km from Cairo, on the Nile. It was the most distant point of the Egyptian railway. His first impressions were poor. On 20 November he wrote:
On 30 November he wrote:
He went back to Europe.
Land's End to John o' Groats
It was on returning to England that he made a second attempt on the long-distance record. He kept a diary which appeared in a newspaper in Aberdeen and in The London Bicycle Club Gazette. On his first day he rode into sweeping rain near Bodmin.Aden
Keith-Falconer chose Aden for his missionary work after reading an article by General Haig, whom he went to see in London. Haig had urged the Church Missionary Society to establish a mission there. There were reports that children attending the Roman Catholic mission returned to Islam on leaving.Keith-Falconer visited Aden in November 1885 for a six-month trial. On 18 November he wrote to his mother:
He and his wife first lived near Crater Pass, overlooking Crater City. He distributed scriptures in the town and read publicly from an Arabic Bible. He then moved to Sheikh Othman, which had wells, a better climate and access to the interior by camel trails.
In November 1886 Keith-Falconer and his wife returned to Aden definitively. He had the support of the Free Church to establish an orphanage and the help of a Glasgow physician, Stewart Corwen. They lived in a house with a walled garden. Alongside it was a hut in which Corwen saw his patients. On 22 February 1887 Keith-Falconer wrote about catching malaria, which he called Aden fever:
He had repeated occurrences of malaria, speaking of "the long spell of fever which both my wife and I have been through", then that "our illness has thrown us back in every way", later that "I have been suffering from remitting fever; for twelve weary weeks, on my back a useless invalid."
Finally, his biographer wrote:
Personal life and death
Keith-Falconer married Gwendolen Bevan, daughter of the banker Robert Cooper Lee Bevan, in Cannes on 4 March 1884. They had their honeymoon in southern France and in Italy, where they inspected the remains of Pompeii before moving to 5 Salisbury Villas, Station Road, Cambridge.He died in Aden after repeated bouts of malaria for which there was no cure. He was 30. A memorial church to him there opened 10 years later. He is buried in Holkat Bay cemetery. The Scottish Mission school and hospital at Sheikh Othman continued until the independence of South Yemen in 1967.
The foreword by the Rev Robert Sinker, librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, to his biography, Memorials of the Hon Ion Keith-Falconer MA says: