Personal Life and Death
Keith-Falconer married Gwendolen 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 32. 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:
- A career of exceptional promise was early closed in the death of Ion Keith-Falconer. The beauty of his character, his ardent missionary zeal, his great learning, form a combination rarely equalled... How noble a life his was, how unselfish, how worthy to be loved, those who knew him know well; how hard it is to adequately set forth, on the one hand, its harmonious beauty, on the other, the rich variety of its aspects, I am very fully conscious.
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