She was appointed research assistant to Joseph Hubert Priestley in the Botany Department at the University of Leeds, and together, they were the first to separate cell walls from the root tip of broad beans.

In 1930, she joined the Imperial Bureau of Plant and Crop Genetics at the School of Agriculture in Cambridge, England, as a scientific officer and translator.

[8] Helen Mary was the daughter of Reverend Horace Edward Chapman, a former rector of Donhead St Andrew,[9] and Adelaide Maria, née Fletcher.

[10] Despite his given name being Albert Darell, he was known as "Tupper" to his friends and was described by John Gilbert Lockhart in Cosmo Gordon Lang's biography as follows:[14] He could get at once on the easiest terms with every sort of person, from the 'drunks' of Leeds and Lowestoft to the millionaires of Monte Carlo ...

[7] Her eldest sister, Jacqueline Marjorie, married the Reverend Edgar James Mitchell, and after their marriage, they undertook missionary work in the Far East.

She competed against candidates from the "best girls' schools in England",[27] the written tests consisting of translation and composition (prose and poetry), essay, and questions on 17th to 19th century French literature.

[30] Her grandmother, Helen Jane Carey, was a keen amateur botanist and specimen collector,[31] a popular and fashionable pastime in Victorian England.

[34][i] In January 1922, Ingham was appointed a research assistant in the botany department,[37] where Joseph Hubert Priestley was Dean of the Faculty of Science.

[43] Described as a "brilliant scholar",[4] she was awarded a MSc degree on 28 June 1928, for her research work and thesis titled Geotropism or Gravity and Growth.

[45]: 139  Abstracts were written on various aspects of plant breeding and genetics, with some of the foreign language papers requiring more complete translations.

[51] After her marriage, she worked from home translating most of the German documents,[48] and in 1939, was put in charge of the bureau after Hudson fell ill.[52] Around 1922, Ingham sat for a portrait by William Roberts, the "English Cubist" artist.

The finished painting was titled "Portrait of Miss Jane Tupper‑Carey" and was shown for the first time in November 1923 at New Chenil Galleries, Chelsea.

[55] In December 1928, she took part in a fashion show of dresses through the ages at the Albion Hall, Leeds, in aid of St Faith's Homes.

She wore a high-waisted, skin-tight coat of red cloth edged with fur, a long blue skirt trimmed with six rows of black velvet, and a feather toque.

She married Albert Ingham on 6 July 1932 at St Edward's Church, Cambridge, in a private ceremony attended only by her parents, sister Edith, brother-in-law Michael Sadleir, who gave her away, and Redman King.

[64] Alan Pars, godfather to their son Michael,[65] later recommended Albert for an Admiralty post in America knowing that Ingham and the children were still there.

[74] In the plumule, cellulose is associated with greater quantities of pectin, but less protein and fatty acid, particularly when the adult parenchyma is grown in light.

"[75] Florence Mary Wood, a British postdoctoral researcher in biochemistry at Birkbeck College,[76] questioned their results and concluded that less than 0.001% of protein was found in the cell walls of the plants examined.

[79] The observation that in the hypocotyl the cells on the convex side are considerably larger than those on the inside could be explained by the uneven transverse transport of the growth hormone auxin.

[80]: 2 Harald Kaldewey, professor of botany at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany,[81] measured the differences in the length of the sub-epidermal cells on the outer and inner periphery of the arch in the nutation curvature of the pedicels of snake's head fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris.

[79] In Ingham's last study in the botany department at the University of Leeds, she ring-barked Laburnum and sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) trees,[84] but left zigzag bridges of tissue with horizontal portions linking the bark above and below the cut.

[41] At first, the lack of pressure within these bridges resulted in the formation of callus-like tissue, and the cambial initials, by repeated division, came to resemble ray cells.