research on expanding and collating the place-names of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, a project that had been started before her by Frank Merry Stenton and his wife Lady Doris Stenton; her work in this field would see publication as the two volume The Place-Names of Oxfordshire (1953–54). She felt that her approach differed from Stenton's on political grounds; she believed most place-names had been developed by ordinary working people, whereas she thought that he "empathised with the ruling classes." Success: 1952–2009 In 1952 she married the Manx archaeologist Peter Gelling, who soon obtained a teaching job at the University of Birmingham. For this reason, the couple moved to Harborne where she remained for the rest of her life. There, she would spend much time gardening, and although had no children of her own, raised her nephew, Adrian Midgley, from the age of six. She would undertake research for a PhD from the University of London by correspondence, supervised by Albert Hugh Smith; devoted to the place-names of West Berkshire, her thesis was completed in 1957. Having left the Communist Party, she still considered herself "very left-wing", campaigning on behalf of the local branch of the centre-left Labour Party. She accompanied her husband on his archaeological excavations to various sites, both domestically and abroad. In the 1960s, she accompanied him to Alto Plano in Peru to study the development of potato cultivation, where she gained experience in cooking at high altitude. In the early 1970s, she travelled with him to Cyprus, where she was sorting through finds in the castle at Kyrenia when the Turkish army invaded in July 1974. For a number of seasons she managed morale and catering at the excavation camp at Deerness, Orkney, which her husband used as a training dig for his students. During the 1960s, she published a series of innovative books on English place-names, also lecturing on the subject across the English Midlands under the aegis of the University of Birmingham's Department of Extra-Mural Studies. She also lectured at Birmingham University on occasion, as well as running a summer school at Oxford. She went on to publish her three volumes of The Place-Names of Berkshire (1973, 1974 and 1976), which she followed with Signposts to the Past: Place-Names and the History of England (1978), a book which "put her in an elevated position among English toponymists" and which saw revised editions in 1987 and 1997.