Ion Grant Neville Keith-Falconer (5 July 1856 – 11 May 1887) was a Scottish missionary and Arabic scholar, the third son of the 8th Earl of Kintore.

In 1886, he was appointed Arabic professor at Cambridge, but his career was cut short near Aden while in missionary work.

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.

[1] 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.

The following April he won a four-mile (6 km) race, described as "the amateur championship", at Lillie Bridge, setting a record time.

[6] 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.

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.

"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.

The state of the area is summarised by this account: Keith-Falconer taught himself Hebrew at Harrow and then moved on to other Semitic languages.

[citation needed] Keith-Falconer continued his study of Arabic in Germany, as much to perfect speaking German as deepen his knowledge of Arabia.

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.

[citation needed] Keith-Falconer chose Aden for his missionary work after reading an article by General Haig, whom he went to see in London.

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.

The Scottish Mission school and hospital at Sheikh Othman continued until the independence of South Yemen in 1967.