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The Odd Way Mensa Began
By Victor Serebriakoff, Hon. Pres.
In 1945, WW II ended after an atom bomb massacre,
Roosevelt and Hitler died, Churchill lost office and the
Chinese Communist government was founded. Amid
these great events a trivial one. An English University
student and an Australian Barrister met on a train and
became friends. Mensa was the outcome.
Roland Berrill, at 49, bearded, thick-set, and prosperously
dressed had large bulging eyes. He stared confidently at
the smaller, younger, Lancelot Ware, a mature student
who had returned to his Oxford studies after a wartime
interruption. Ware was reading Hansard, the British
Parliamentary report. Berrill was intrigued and started a
conversation. They exchanged cards. They met a few
times, and at one meeting, on 11 March 1946, Ware
gave Berrill an intelligence test. Berrill was delighted
to be told that he had a very high score.
There is a dispute about who first thought of the idea of a
high IQ society. Professor Sir Cyril Burt, the first President
of Mensa, in the forward to my first history of Mensa in '63
seemed to be under the impression that a broadcast of his
had sowed the seed of the idea in Berrill's mind. Berrill's
brother and several other contemporaries say that Berrill
affirmed this view.
Dr. Ware had resigned from Mensa around 1950 and
Berrill was dead. That was what we all thought for the
first 22 years until a new editor of the Mensa Journal
announced that Dr. Ware was the true founder. The
article was amended after pressure from early members,
and by compromise we accepted that the Roland Berrill
and Dr. Ware were joint founders.
Dr. Ware rejoined and became Vice President and later
was recognized as fons et origo, from his claim that the
idea had been his. The first Secretary Berrill founded the
society in the usual sense that he set it going. He wrote
the idiosyncratic pamphlets, did the work and supplied
the start-up cash. He recruited about 400 members
using unsupervised self-administered intelligent tests
and resigned his office in 1950, very unhappy with
members' inadequate responses to his odd letter. He
died a few years later.
Mensa activity declined for some years and membership
fell. One day at a Mensa dinner, Joe Wilson, the Secretary,
said. "Look, this is not a society, we are just a group who
enjoy eating out together, let us stop pretending."
Remembering the enormous exhilaration I used to get
out of the robust, frank, witty arguments and Mensa
discussions, I, like a fool, said, "That would be a pity,"
and, in accordance with what is now our oldest tradition,
was immediately appointed the new Secretary.
We had about 100 members left and about £56 in the kitty.
So, in my spare time, I set up a committee, got the testing
sorted out, and started the slow climb back uphill. It was a
very long hard struggle. Like anybody who is active, I found
myself under constant opposition, much of it stertorous and
strenuous. But I am a survivor. In the end they made me
President to shut me up. With 103,000 members in over a
hundred countries. In my forty-second year of voluntary
service for World Mensa and my ninth decade on what
Buckminster Fuller, the second Mensa President, called
"Planet Earth," I feel like the sorcerer's apprentice and
I begin to wonder, "What have I done?"
But I am pleased and proud. We bicker a lot but we shall
survive. No-one knows the good we do. People have met,
made friends, married, written books and papers, formed
partnerships in constructive efforts of all kinds, and good
commercial companies and groups and projects of immense
diversity. Above all, we have enormously enjoyed each
others' company at millions of meetings. I feel I have done
a little good to make up for all muddles, mistakes and
wrong decisions I have made in a long hyperactive life.
From the Internet - by Victor Serebriakoff and lightly edited, 6 June 1995.
Victor Serebriakoff passed away January 1, 2000.
Lancelot Lionel Ware passed away August 15, 2000.
He was 85.
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American Mensa - Region 3