Margaret Gelling
| Margaret Joy Gelling | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Margaret Joy Midgley 29 November 1924 Manchester |
| Died | 24 April 2009 (aged 84) |
| Nationality | English |
| Education | Chislehurst Grammar School (Now: Chislehurst School for Girls previously being Beaverwood School For Girls) |
| Alma mater | St Hilda's College, Oxford (BA), University College London (PhD) |
| Occupation | toponymist |
| Spouse(s) | Peter Stanley Gelling |
Margaret Joy Gelling, OBE (née Midgley, 29 November 1924 – 24 April 2009) was an English toponymist, known for her extensive studies of English place-names. She served as President of the English Place-Name Society from 1986 to 1998, and Vice-President of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences from 1993 to 1999, as well as being a Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford, and member of both the Society of Antiquaries of London and the British Academy.
Born in Manchester and raised in Kent, she studied at St Hilda's College, becoming involved in socialist activism. She proceeded to work for the English Place-Name Society from 1946 to 1953, focusing her research on the place-names of Oxfordshire and Berkshire. Marrying archaeologist Peter Gelling of the University of Birmingham in 1952, she moved to Harborne in Birmingham while undertaking her PhD research into the place-names of West Berkshire. Lecturing on the subject across the Midlands, she published her research in a series of books, achieving prominence within academia for her 1978 work Signposts to the Past: The Geographical Roots of Britain's Place-names. In the coming decades she focused on researching the place-names of Shropshire, resulting in a multi-volume publication, earning a number of awards and prominent appointments for her life's work.
Gelling's work focused on establishing the Old English origins of English place-names in the Midlands, and her approach sought to connect toponyms to geographical features in the landscape.
Margaret Joy Midgley was born to a lower-middle-class family in Manchester on 29 November 1924, the daughter of an insurance salesman. As a child, her family moved to Sidcup in Kent, and she gained her secondary education from Chislehurst Grammar School. The first member of her family to attend university, she studied English language and literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she was influenced by Dorothy Whitelock, who inspired her interest in place-names. Graduating in 1945, she later related that the experience at Oxford had been a "waste of time", believing English literature to be "dreadfully boring". Politically a socialist, at Oxford she had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, and enjoyed arguing politics with her right-wing family.
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