Ion Keith-Falconer - Aden

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:

I doubt whether anyone could leave here long without a weakening of all his faculties. I read Arabic for several hours a day, and a native fikih, or schoolmaster, comes daily to instruct me. Aden is not without its disadvantages as a mission station. The climate is very enervating and at the same time there is no hill-station anywhere near for the missionaries to go and recruit; but possibly after time such a hill-station will be opened. The relations between the English and the neighbouring tribes become more satisfactory as time goes on.

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:

I never felt so utterly miserable in all my life... One of our Somali servants has had it as well, but coupled with a great deal of shivering... Quinine is quite useless in this fever, one must simply grin and bear it.

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:

It was almost exactly six months after the young missionary, full of keen hopes and joyous anticipations, had left England for the East, that the telegram told the unlooked-for news of his death and his burial amid the scene of his labours... That warm, loving heart, that keen, active brain, were, for this world, at rest.