The society for the Highly Intelligent
by Victor Serebriakoff
Chapters 2 and 3
It happened at a Mensa Monthly Dinner at Beguinot's Restaurant sometime late in 1953. The crowd of sixteen or so that used to be at table in Berrill's days, had shrunk to a tiny circle: the Wilson brothers, Win, and I. The discussion turned to Mensa affairs and George Wilson pointed out that it had been the same four at the last few dinners. 'This is not a Mensa dinner,' he reasonably pointed out. 'We are just four friends who enjoy eating together.' Joe then reminded us that he had had no volunteer after his request to be relieved and that we ought to face the fact that Mensa had quietly expired.
I agreed but I paused, remembering the great thrill and joy it had been when I first went to the Annual Gathering three years before. 'It seems a pity', I foolishly said.
That was the turning point. I had taken up the defence and released Joe to be the pessimist. I began to outline things I thought could be done and my late friend turned them down, stressed the difficulties, pointed out the problems and ever and again said, 'But who will do the work?'
I was finally goaded into an offer: 'Let me have a try at a membership campaign'. Joe then suggested that I should do the work and assume, experimentally, the status of Joint Secretary with him.
The joint idea never worked at all and I was effectively the Secretary, Chief Executive and Principal Officer of Mensa from that moment, without the slightest objection from the handful of members who were still paying up by then. The financial responsibility was not too daunting. The Treasurer had declared in July that the entire assets of Mensa, which it was his responsibility to administer, amounted to twenty-five pounds sterling. l have tried my best to be a good custodian of this sum. Mensa's yearly cash turnover today is in excess of two and a half million pounds. But the transformation took a long time and I did get a lot of help, in the end a great deal of help.
I went home from the dinner asking myself why I had allowed myself take on this new responsibility on top of all the others I had.
But I pitched in. Tentatively at first, and then with more confidence. I scrapped the pretentious, idiosyncratic wording Berrill had used and tried a few small personal adverts in the more serious newspapers. l simply offered to test the intelligence of the applicant without saying too much about why. I remembered my motivation in my own application and guessed that people would be curious to know their IQ.
My applicants received a brochure which I had completely rewritten, leaving out the pretensions and simply referring to the social aspects and the Burt aim of research on opinions distribution among the intelligent. I dropped all mention of the possibility of being a Think Tank to advise the authorities and, remembering Berrill's mistake in muddling his own and Mensa opinion in public, emphasised strongly that Mensa was impartial, uncommitted, and disinterested. Mensa was to be an agora, a forum for the exploration of opinions, not a pressure group with its own opinions or collective aims. This has remained our hidden strength through the years.
These were the sort of words: 'Members and groups within Mensa have views but Mensa itself has none. Nothing is to be done in the name of Mensa that could alienate or exclude people of any shade of opinion; no political action is to be taken by the society beyond the publication of the range of members' views. Mensa has no political, religious or nationalist affiliations and does not recognise distinctions of social class or race.'
A steady flow of replies came in and I set to work to devise a system for dealing with it, getting out forms and devising procedures to simplify the work so that it could be delegated when, as must happen before long, I got fed up with it.
The response grew as I experimented with the adverts to maximise it. And the phase take-up grew as I tried variations with the brochure and presentation.
The committee, which is the progenitor of the whole of Mensa's present day organisational set-up, arose informally as I called together groups of the Mensa helpers to whom I was able to communicate my growing enthusiasm.
The Mensa problem has always been that we have to process a lot of applicants to get a few new members and the work was very heavy for me working on my own. I began to importune the trickle of new members and some of established ones, asking them for help with the work.
They all took it the same way. They explained that they were far too busy, that they were unconvinced about the value of Mensa or its prospects, and that they were unsuitable for the task I was trying to foist upon them. Having got that clear, a proportion of them took up the task I had allocated on a strictly temporary and provisional basis. They proceeded to perform it quickly, and efficiency without help, instruction or encouragement. They were Mensa members. Here was another hidden strength.
More aware of the motivating and progress-checking aspects of meetings than of their democratise and decision-making function, I then began to persuade the activists to come and talk things over at meetings at my flat or Joe Wilson's flat, at Ralph Spicer's house, at Sinclair Eustace's house and all over the place. Some of the names of these very early helpers come back: George Stickland, a very thin young man, like me from humble home, taught me statistics and helped with the opinion researches I was doing. Dr Robert Green, who has been a long-term friend. He was the first psychologist to help me with the testing problems. A Freudian therapist called James Hayes and a chemist called Alan Stableford helped. A man we called Bunny Arnold. There were many more. They came, worked hard for a bit and then lost interest. But they were all essential. It would not have happened without them.
The fluid, changing group gradually began to behave more like a committee, to have both the faults and the virtues of one.
I found myself at these meetings, as I did in all my other circles, in the position of the supplicant enthusiast in a game like a slow bowler in cricket against a stone-wall batsman. I would put forward my increasingly ambitious ideas, plans and suggestions and the rest of the group, which included Win, would patiently explain to me with great care that what I proposed was, apart from being evidence of criminal insanity, morally, legally, and practically unsound and objectionable. Then after a discussion they would say in some form, 'Very well then, go ahead, but on your head be it.' I was not to come crying to them when it all went wrong.
Of course it often did but we averaged out all right and we began, noticeably, to grow. I sometimes got over a hundred replies to my adverts and processing them and marking the tests was quite a chore.
Then, after an extremely negative response to the idea from the committee, I made the decision which really made large-scale development possible. Doubtfully, I started a procedure which would have prevented my own application. A demand for money. I started charging for the tests which at that early stage were still unsupervised. I saw that if we depended for all the recruitment activity only upon subscriptions we should be loading the acquired members with heavy and growing costs as we expanded. We had to make the unsuccessful candidates pay towards the advertising, publicity and organisation costs involved in testing and recruitment. In return, they could get an assessment of their intelligence quotient. Quid pro quo.
In effect I started a little mail order intelligence testing business which was to be viable in its own right. And it had a spin off, a by-product. Mensa.
Projects have to be viable on several levels. Mensa is commercially viable although it is a non-profit making organisation because, like commercial ones, it persuades its enquirers to pay for the adverts and publicity which attract enquiries.
To avoid any misunderstanding, neither I nor any elected official of Mensa since has ever had any pecuniary interest in Mensa. I never had any payment of any kind for my time and work. Often I was not able to recover my expenses. Thousands of other Mensa volunteers as we grew have given their effort altruistically. Mensa is run by hobbyists. We now have paid staff but they are not members.
Soon with the income that Mensa got from test fees and from the growing number of subscribers I was able to set up the first prototype selection agency, a team of helpers working in their own homes, to deal with the routine work of testing.and recruitment. Thus the committee were released to help organise a social programme to keep our growing band happy.
I was not inactive on the research front. I was convinced that Mensa had to be seen to be more than just an intellectually snobbish version of a social club and in publicity, which was beginning to come, I emphasised the research role which, for lack of other volunteers I was doing largely myself, gradually learning the statistical techniques of opinion sampling.
During 1955 my motivation as regards Mensa was growing with its first small successes. I must have begun to taper off on my other spare time interests and devote more time to Mensa, there is little on the record. In that year's Proceedings, I said in my editorial: 'The Miracle continues. Mensa maintains its flickering existence. The Society has not for some years been any one person's main interest but it persistently refuses quite to die. The small group, all very busy people, who reluctantly find the time to keep this tiny candle alight feel under an almost mystic compulsion. ''Just a little longer", we say to ourselves, perhaps someone will emerge able and ready to organise and utilise this tenuous but persistent entity. Perhaps one of the universities will become interested. Perhaps one enlightened journal will be found to sponsor us.'
In March 1956 I was talking of the 'end of the plateau on our growth curve' and a 'new lease of life' and my little scribbled notebooks which are the only record of the unminuted meetings, tell me that we were feeling out vigorously in all directions as we began to sense that we were touching a sensitive nerve somehow. At this time I was avoiding press publicity. Mensa has been a natural Aunt Sally for journalists in an egalitarian age and, before I got experience with the press, I ran into the same ridicule that Berrill had had in a few articles. So I tended to brush off reporters. But my notebook shows that I was constantly thinking up new schemes, approaching people, getting speakers, organising meetings and proposing research projects.
In my notes there is one small but vital scribble heralding the beginning of Mensa International. I had noted, 'General. Accept overseas members?' Knowing the vaunting secret dreams I have dared to have from the first I am sure I argued for the inclusion of foreigners, although Berrill's idea had been for a British club. I am equally sure there was argument against. At any rate there is, against my query, my affirmative tick and the phrase, 'Charge more'. This little inky note marks the birth of World Mensa. The decision had been made. It would come to be.
Another note, 'Quarterly Residential', heralded the start of another Mensa Institution. We planned and had the first weekend conference at a beautiful Quaker retreat at Charney Basset in Berkshire, the forerunner of Eric Hills' twenty-five year series of similar meetings and of course of the numerous Regional Gatherings in America and Mensa At Cambridge and many such.
In this forward-looking year for Mensa there was another bold departure: the first beginnings of the future Local Groups structure. At the Stork Hotel in Birmingham a group of London members went to meet Bernard Billings the World's very first Locsec, as horribly but traditionally we called the Local Secretary or organiser of a local group. We met modestly in the coffee bar downstairs, and, consuming our coffee and buns, laid plans for the very first Mensa Local Group. Bernard, a short, modest. amiable man, was a draughtsman in a motor firm. He was the first of many Locsecs.
Erika Omasta took on recruitment in 1956 and dealt with a growing stream of enquiries. But she was very conscientious and, like some helpers who were to follow, was unhappy with what she saw as the unplanned, unconsidered rush of our progress. She resigned because she thought we should consolidate and do more for the new members we were attracting. At the end of the year I reported Erika's good work and talked of 'A new lease of life'.
At the 1956 Annual Gathering the Committee actually reported to the members an innovation, the beginning of democracy. We were routinely confirmed in office, I would say 're-elected en bloc, had we been elected in the first case. We tried to get agreement to an increase in subscriptions from ten shillings (nowadays 50 pence) to one pound and failed. The decision was that members should have the option of paying ten bob or a pound but that there should be no distinction between the ten shillingers and the pounders. Almost all paid the higher rate.
In 1957 we were getting such good attendances at the monthly dinners that I called them twice each month. We used to get a big, excited, eagerly talking and laughing group round a long table at a German restaurant called Schmidt's in Charlotte Street. There was a steady flow of applications which I found I could generate by an increasing array of means. I wrote letters to newspapers and placed advertisements in the personal columns. I badgered members for recommendations and continued to get press publicity. All these means interacted to produce a constant flow of applications. Members began to come steadily. A handful of overseas names began to appear on the records.
As Secretary I reported, 'An almost embarrassingly large number of applications came in and the conversion rate seems to be somewhat better than the usual ten percent, so that a useful group has joined us.'
And later, 'A further series of vigorous membership campaigns conducted by Joan and Peter Needs has continued the brisk expansion of our society. Well over a thousand applications have been dealt with in the year . . . We have at the time of going to press increased our membership by over a hundred during the last nine months.'
The next important step was in 1958. I made my first real breakthrough.
Dr (later Professor) Bob Green was, is, a short, aggressive but sweet-natured man with curly hair, a broken nose in a kindly wrinkled face, and a great gift for friendship. He had first come to my attention in the early days, as a casually dressed student member who upset Roland Berrill. Berrill arranged a meeting with a speaker from the Dianetics movement which was beginning then. This is the movement that developed Scientology.
With his magnificent talent for credulity, Berrill swallowed Dianetics. He introduced the speaker by telling us with calm certitude and awe that we were about to hear teachings that were more important than any since those of Jesus Christ. The young innocent who had been hampered with that build-up started with a confident but muddled farrago of meaningless jargon. Berrill paid wrapt attention while the rest of us were embarrassed. Remedy was left to the young student, Bob Green. With quiet, polite but very shrewd questions, Bob skilfully brought out the contradictions and quickly reduced Berrill's prot�g� to a gawping mumbling silence. The poor young Dianeticist dried up, stood silent, then wisely and incontinently fled the scene. Berrill was not pleased. (Parenthetically, Berrill retained his faith in Dianetics, he shaved off his splendid beard and moustache, complained about his previous ways and seemed a diminished man. He used to tell me miserably how much good it was doing him. 'I used', he dolefully complained, 'to be a Happy Charlie.' Dianetics certainly cured that but I could not see the benefit myself.)
By 1958 I had become friends with Bob who had taken a post lecturing at the Psychology Department of London University. Ever importuning on behalf of Mensa I asked Bob's help about two things. I was worried about the fact that we were admitting members on an unsupervised test and I wanted to see how the members we were accepting would score on a supervised one. Would he conduct a test session or two for this purpose? Would the College let him hold it on their premises? Yes they would. We actually called applicants to the 'Later supervised test' which from Berrill's time had been a bluff to discourage cheating. Bob checked two sessions of about thirty candidates. He found that almost all those we had accepted at the ninety-ninth percentile (the one percent level) on an unsupervised test scored at the ninety-eighth percentile - the two percent level on the supervised one. It was then that I fixed the final criterion of acceptance. I decided that it was impractical to give all members a supervised test and thus reject a lot of members. I convinced the Committee we should continue as we were, accepting the real position and abandoning illusions. Ever afterwards Mensa accepted members at the one percent level on unsupervised test but at the two percent level on the supervised test. Later the supervised test became the only acceptable qualification.
But that, though important, was not the breakthrough. The breakthrough came when poor Bob, who has always been amused at my activity and enthusiasm, foolishly and kindly, consented to my second request. Ever ready to exploit a friend to serve my ambitions for Mensa, I wanted replies from applicants to be addressed to him at his respected address at the university. I thought the address would give assurance about Mensa's bona fides (which were good but not widely known). 'How many letters do you get?' said the incautious Bob. 'Oh! A dozen or so a week.'
A week or two later he was on the mat before his furious professor because of the sacks of mail addressed to him that were coming in. My scheme had come off with a vengeance. Bob rang me in alarm and told me to stop the flood. I cancelled the advert and apologised. The professor was given a promise that there would be no repetition.
A week later Bob phoned again in a real frenzy because many more sacks of mail had arrived for him, a very junior lecturer. The newspaper had ignored my cancellation. The professor was livid, Bob was under a cloud for a time, and I was distressed at hurting my friend.
But I found myself gloating over 1400 applications. More important, my ambitious eyes were opened to hitherto unforeseen possibilities.
It was sometime round then that I made the first of a very large number of television appearances.
An upper class gentleman, the Honourable Anthony Wedgwood Benn was the comp�re of a regular feature in which he quizzed the leaders of the many odd and cranky societies that thrive so well in the obscurity of the muggy English air.
At our interview he was friendly and seemed to accept that it had been wrong to class me as a crank.
My first appearance on television brought a fair batch of applications in spite of the context. I gained experience. I learned for myself about the publicity. There is very good publicity, good publicity and bad publicity. Very good is when they do not knock you, good is when they do knock you and bad is when you do not get any publicity at all. Mensa has done very well by observing this principle.
In the Mensa Proceedings of 1958 my Editorial after the Bob Green breakthrough is headed by the single word. 'Swamped'. 'Mensa's new dynamic continues' l wrote. 'We have had a year of almost embarrassingly rapid expansion and progress. A few small advertisements in The Observer (the fatal ones which embarrassed Bob Green), brought us an overwhelming rush of applications which almost swamped us. As we accept the last few members from this campaign we are trying to summon up enough courage to invite another deluge by inserting a new series of advertisements, but we really need more clerical help before we do.' I pointed out that Mensa was now active in two centres, London and Birmingham, and complained that we still lacked the initiative from someone to set up the third centre.
The Annual Gathering was larger now than any before with 6o members attending a really successful weekend like those of Berrill's time.
I had started a series called The Annual Lecture and Professor Philip Vernon gave the first in 1956. Professor Stanislav Andreski gave the second one in 1957, and Professor Sir Cyril Burt was to give the third one in 1958. It was on that occasion that I asked him to accept the role of Mensa President.
It was also in that year that I started the regular lecture-discussion meetings that are now known as Think-lns. A group which is ideally between twenty and forty assemble in a room with fairly comfortable seats and decent surroundings to hear a shortish talk by a speaker of distinction on some topic which should be speculative or controversial. The talk is followed by a long discussion with plenty of contributions from the floor and the chairman trying to see that everybody gets a word in and that no one dominates the floor. 'And now someone who has not spoken before' is his cry. Members love the free-rein rambling and often excitable and contentious arguments that go on at Think-lns. There is always a lot of teasing and laughter in a climate which manages to be both hard-hitting and critical but essentially urbane and friendly. It reminds me of the amicable contention in large families that I have known. When later I split away as the leader of Mensa International and a new British Committee took over, both the Think-In, and the Annual Lecture were discontinued, but largely due to a much loved American London member Harry Schacter, Think-lns were revived under the new name early in the seventies and have been increasingly successful ever since. (This year (1984) the Annual Lecture was revived with a masterly discourse by Professor Richard Gregory.)
In January 1959 Mensa solved another problem. Berrill had known that the society had to have a means of regular and frequent communication before it would be more than an idea, a dream, but his own attempt to sustain a monthly periodical foundered after three months.
Some time in 1959 a small quiet man, Basil Mager, a grey-haired teacher from the new sprawling suburban brick town of Burgess Hill responded to my importunities by saying that he would not mind having a shot at producing the regular monthly magazine we needed so as to keep members informed of the growing list of meetings and activities. 'On an experimental basis for a month or two', he cautiously qualified. Promptly as promised, on January 1959 the periodical appeared. The Mensa Correspondence was a six-sided foolscap duplicated sheet which was the precursor of many monthly National Mensa Newsletters around the world today. Some are now large full colour magazines.
The first issue had a criticism by a very tall and beautiful American member called Valery Gerry of Michael Young's The Rise Of The Meritocracy, articles knocking radiaesthesia and telepathy, a long article by a German member about the problem of Berlin and Kruschev and the piece of my lightweight doggerel. Val Gerry joined the committee and helped me in New York later.
In the next issue I refer to a very bad article I had about me in The People which put me off journalists for a time.
In the fifth issue in June we begin to get the list of meetings that has been the main feature of the journal and its successors ever since. There were eight meetings in June.
Further, May 1959 was the historic month when I hit Berrill's original target of six hundred members. Berrill's tribe was, at last, thirteen years after, up to full strength.
In July there was a meeting of members at the arboretum in Sheffield Park. It was the very last Mensa occasion at which our Founder Roland Berrill appeared. He had grown his beard again but was very subdued.
A young trainee solicitor called Maurice Salzedo put a short note in the journal to explain that he had been asked to help organise a local group structure for our spreading band. Salzedo reported that the Birmingham and Bristol groups had faded but he had set up new ones in Leeds, Cambridge, Manchester and Brighton and had high hopes for other places. At the AG we had a number of distinguished speakers and Professor Sir Cyril Burt gave the Annual Lecture on the subject of 'The Gifted Child'.
In June 1960 I announced that Professor Sir Cyril Burt, quite an old man by that time, had consented to accept the honorary post of President of Mensa. As the world doyen in psychology at the time he brought us respectability, his support helped us to overcome the very natural suspicions of professional psychologists (later all over the world), and his many beautifully legible handwritten letters were for many years a source of comfort and advice to me in my growing task.
In a note in January 1960 I point out that I am in touch with the newly established American National Association for Gifted Children and that, together with an American who had joined here, A. A. Hyatt, they were working on the possibility of an American Branch of Mensa. In February 1960 a T. F. Sandeman from Melbourne wonders if he is the only antipodean M (as we were beginning to call ourselves). I told him there was another, a Michael McGuiness. This was the very first manifestation of the now flourishing Australian Mensa.
It was obviously because I was working from London that the Mensa infection began to spread abroad. Our little adverts were attracting interest from the millions of people who pass through London every year and so a gradually growing group of overseas members were being added to our rolls. The sort of people who can join are natural travellers; all travellers pass through London now and again. This was why we found ourselves in a world game.
My first really important television show was with that very distinguished broadcaster Alan Whicker, who then comp�red a show called 'Tonight'. He took over my sitting room with an enormous team who spent an entire Sunday making an outrageous TV travesty of what we were. In my first real experience of TV the world's most powerful and peremptory autocracy. I got a really nasty knocking programme for my pains. However, as always, the publicity brought many enquiries and, of course, more attention from the press and other media. We were making a mark.
Through 1960 the Mensa Correspondence grew larger, featured more meetings, more regional groups and more activities of every kind. In May, Eric Hills, one who proved himself to be a Mensa stalwart, was asked by the Committee to take on the Residential Conferences which had been run by various people up till then. Edinburgh Mensa had started and that Universal and ubiquitous Mensa institution called the Pub Meeting had started and was being held several times a month. Steven Russell, the first treasurer who was a qualified accountant, had volunteered to help.
Joyce Mumford was a small pretty woman, a graduate and the wife of a cartographer. When she joined she had two very young children to look after and was soon to have a third. Joyce joined the Committee and, seeing and understanding the growing organisational problems, decisively took over the recruitment and office functions, working from her own home in Chessington, Surrey, which she turned into a Mensa office with a duplicating machine to produce the Correspondence.
Having done his stint Mager passed the editorship to Sinclair Eustace. Eustace was a friend, a maverick intellectual who was fluent in many languages and the author of the idea of The Mensa School, a school for gifted children, which he was ambitious to found. He was a bachelor and, like Berrill, an eccentric, whose life was a chain of new enthusiasms. He too was of the upper class and he had had a public school education. He was always starting new projects and societies and some of them attracted wide attention and survived. But Sinclair, like Roland Berrill, was a better starter than he was a runner. For a time he was a Mensa enthusiast and a hard worker for us. Then like so many who followed, having done a stint he passed to other things. In June 1960, things having gone wrong, Joyce Mumford having replicated herself (unexpectedly early) instead of the journal and Sinclair having tapered off, I found myself the involuntary editor again. My Mensa friend Bushy Eoliart had started a new offset print business and I took the work to him in the emergency. That was how the Mensa Correspondence climbed out of duplication into print. The first printed issue was for 5 July 1960 and the official Editor was my wife Win.
I had all the problems which are usual with organisations which try to develop with the help of volunteers. The pioneers or leaders of a growing group get overstretched and have to delegate. My volunteers were, it is true, usually competent, fast learners but like any other volunteers who take on heavy chores for the satisfaction they get out of it, they were sometimes less tolerant of difficulties and criticism than those who work for more tangible rewards.
Each new editor comes in with all the confident enthusiasm which arises from the combination of high intelligence and complete innocence of experience. Radical changes of style, size, format and content are the first step, then thinking about policy and searching for contributions. Then, just as the editor gets enough experience to do a tolerable job, he or she jibs at the heavy thankless task, the criticism and the accusations of censorship which come from an inevitable handful of members who feel that failure to publish their overlong, obscure, scruffy, hand-scribbled offerings proves that the editorial policy is rigid censorship. (There seems to be no problem with the writers of interesting, legible offerings that are crowded out.) The fed-up editor then often resigns with a scolding editorial to chasten critics and members alike and another keen volunteer comes along with another new broom to repeat the cycle. It is an good fun for the editors but if members want decent readable, consistent journals they will have, like everybody else, to pay professionals.
1960 was a vital year and the real beginning of Mensa as an international organisation. Also below the surface that year there were sown the seeds of many future quarrels and conflicts which were to liven the scene but be the brake on our progress.
In 1960 in America Mensa began to happen. A spore settled, lived precariously, began to thrive. The first overseas publicity was an article in The Village Voice, a Greenwich Village journal that would correspond to what is known as an 'alternative society' journal today. Since The Village Voice circulates widely in America, the result was a flood of enquiries from New York and many other states which fell on the mat of surprised Joyce Mumford in Chessington. One of these letters was from a New York graduate chemist, Peter Sturgeon. He had passed the test at the one percent level and became a member without a supervised test.
He wrote to Joyce Mumford and got the names of other New York members and, after writing to me, he took the initiative which started American Mensa. He called the very first Mensa meeting to be held outside England.
Further, in 1960, after much heartsearching and worry about the effect on our growth, the Committee decided to implement the new testing scheme I had worked out. I announced the introduction of the supervised test stage in recruitment which had been a bluff up until then. This involved finding qualified psychologists in many areas around the country and arranging for test sessions at regular intervals. There were problems and doubts. For fiscal reasons there had to be a largish group of second stage applicants at each test session. We had to hire a room, usually at the local university, and pay the psychologist out of the test fees. The fees had to be kept low if we were to get enough applicants.
This was a risky and difficult step but it had to be taken if Mensa was to gain acceptance and credence in the world of psychologists. After many false steps and mistakes we gradually evolved a system that worked and was fiscally sound. With local variants this evolved into the present selection system throughout Mensa as it grew and spread overseas.
I had much developed the configuration mentioned earlier which was fiscally viable as well as organisationally so. What was now possible was a business, capable of producing surplus resources which could be spent on publicity and advertising to attract more applicants. We had a chain reaction. I had the prototype of a mental testing organisation which functioned as a profitable business which often actually subsidised the members. It was a business that had an important by-product that was almost irrelevant to its own function. The by-product was Mensa, an ever growing and spreading network of intelligent humanity, brought together as an interacting group.
The British Annual Gathering that year was at the Russell Hotel, and the big newsbreak came this way. I had found the courage after my previous bad press, to invite a young reporter, then of the Sunday Times, to come to the ice breaker party. His story changed the scene. Mensa was suddenly hot news. Over 180 members, trickled shyly into the Russell Hotel next day. They were even more bemused than normal Mensa first timers because of the intense media attention that greeted them.
One reporter spotted my little yellow map pin and that was his headline next day, 'YELLOW MAP PIN - SIGN OF GENIUS'. We had a good meeting and an amused crowd of new members at the AGM amiably shrugged consent to myself and the little group of unknown people, the 'committee' who were responsible for this exciting, amusing and promising confusion. 'Sure! Carry on!' was the attitude when we reported and asked for acceptance of what we were doing.
Applications flooded in and we grew and grew. In England Mensa was on the map-and there were repercussions elsewhere as well. The English-speaking world is in close touch and this first big publicity break in London was probably at least a partial trigger for the New York Times story on Mensa which broke on 18 December. It introduced Mensa and was followed by a WBCS radio show and a published letter from Peter Sturgeon. There was a flood of American enquiries. American Mensa was off and running.
By the end of 1960 Eric Hills, the new Local Groups Officer in the UK, was able to announce that he had 10 British groups meeting. But in the Mensa Correspondence Charles Strickland and one or two others had begun to talk about the need for a formal constitution. No-one mentioned Berrill's odd one-page effort which had been quietly forgotten. With around eight hundred members we had overshot his target of six hundred anyway.
We set up a sub-committee to work out a more suitable constitution for Mensa. It was headed by our Treasurer, Stephen Russell. It was a three-man committee and it revealed something we were going to have to get used to in Mensa: the difficulty of getting agreement on anything at all, especially Constitutions.
The three men were unable to agree on a single scheme so there were two detailed drafts which had to be put to a referendum of the members. Thus, back in 1960 were laid the fatal foundations of Mensa's favourite destructive blood sport, constitutioneering.
By February 1961 the Mensa Correspondence, still a duplicated sheet produced on a second-hand rotary machine at Chessington, was able to announce twenty-one meetings around Great Britain.
By September 1961 we had 1,550 members world-wide. And Mensa demonstrated its own quality by the results of the referendum ballot. Asked to choose between the two constitutions that had been produced by the three person committee, Mensa decided. Both constitutions were rejected. The majority of members preferred the British tradition of an unwritten constitution based on practice, case law and common law. But that perfectly democratic decision (401/548) led to prolonged, damaging quarrels and agitations by the minority who had been denied their way.
During the year Mensa grew vigorously both in Britain and America and Peter Sturgeon began, very reasonably, to complain to me about the long drawn-out process of recruitment via Chessington. It became obvious that a transatlantic recruitment procedure was not going to serve. Peter called for someone to go to New York and get things going in America and I realised that I might be able to contrive to do just that. I called a meeting. Tentatively I floated this outrageous idea.
The committee were becoming disturbed if not alarmed by the unexpected but traumatic successes that my increasing efforts were bringing. They were hesitant; there was a feeling that we had enough on our plate with what I had stirred up in England, that we should consolidate and concentrate on doing more for the many new members we already had in Britain. There were three views at the long contentious meeting. We ought to confine our attention to Britain and let other nations build up independent Mensa movements if they wanted to; we should accept overseas members but do nothing further to promote Mensa overseas; we should ride the tide while it was favourable. We did not know what our potential was but it looked bigger than we had thought possible. We should take courage, go forward and try, at least, to create a united international Mensa. This first attempt to unite a set of human beings with the sole common bond of intelligence should not falter because of our timidity. I managed to persuade the committee, by a narrow majority, to agree to fund a trip to America to satisfy Peter's urgent pleas and set up a recruitment centre.
By the time Peter got my news he had made contact with a new member, John Codella. John is the man who, more than any other, should have the credit for Mensa's immediate great expansion in America.
He had at that time just sold his interest in an extremely successful publicity company which he had built up at a fashionable address on Manhattan. He was an expert at the rapidly developing art of public relations and, relieved of the need to think about earning a living, the idea of Mensa appealed to him. He had the time and the enthusiasm and he took on the onerous, unpaid, and as it turned out, ill-rewarded task of building Mensa up in America. His influence was brief but decisive; it changed our ways and set us on the road to where we are. He showed us how to get the continuous public attention which is what Mensa then needed in order to survive.
In London on 15 August 1961 I got his first polite, formal letter offering help in the development of Mensa in America. Sensing the possible effectiveness of the man I replied with some enthusiasm, telling him in great detail of the organisational problems I anticipated. All through the summer I was in constant postal communication with John and Peter as we laid detailed plans for my visit which was to be early in November so that I could be back in time to report to the Annual General Meeting.
I insisted that John should advertise in good time so that there were candidates lined up, ready for me to interview. If the committee could be persuaded to take the further plunge we could then set up a testing and recruitment centre in New York. He advertised in The New York Times and by the time I arrived there were about thirty candidates willing to work from their own homes to make a replica of what we had organised in England.
My concept was a chain of what I called National Selection Agencies which were to be professional, separate from and partially independent of Mensa. The Mensa Selection agencies (MSAs) were to be confidential. Applicant's names would only be revealed to Mensa if they were successful. (I did not want candidates to fear that failure in the test could be revealed.) The first two agencies were to be BMSA and AMSA (for British, and American, Mensa Selection Agency). Agents and employees, if there were any, were not to be members. The MSA was to be the channel into Mensa but not part of it. Instructions on tests and the supervision thereof were to come from professional psychologists and were not to be subject to political control from Mensa authorities themselves. All this, as well as the cost of attracting applicants (clerical work, publicity, advertising), was to be paid for out of test fees that were to be charged at the two stages of testing. Members subscriptions were to be used exclusively for services to them.
The preliminary test phase was essential for two reasons. Firstly it generated a large proportion of the MSA income because a lot of people are curious to learn their IQ on a simple self-administered test at their home. Secondly the first test acts as a 'come on' which encourages many who would not be confident or motivated enough to make a long journey to a supervised test session. Those who got a good preliminary score were encouraged to proceed.
Mensa was to be set up on regional lines. The Committee was to see itself at first as two different committees. It would meet as the International Committee responsible for world-wide development and all testing and recruitment. It would also meet, with a different hat on, as simply the committee of British Mensa, which beside American Mensa, was to be just one of what was to be a growing chain of semi-autonomous national Mensas.
To stay within my tiny budget I had got a ticket on an ancient Iceland Airways prop-plane that wandered vaguely across the north of the world from Glasgow via refuelling stops in Reykjavik, Gander and some other icy places I do not remember. The journey took two wearisome days.
I was met by a party led by Peter Sturgeon and John Codella. New York hit me like a blow. The two intensely alert, enthusiastic, talkative, young men took me over and began to instruct, explain, plan, guide, argue with and rush an exhausted bewildered Limey through the autumn afternoon to a welcoming party. I was rushed here and there, being interviewed by newspapers, radio, television, all arranged by the energetic and sapient John Codella. I met hundreds of people, was pursued by the press and given the fullest treatment.
But I had not quite forgotten the object of the exercise and all through the week I was talking to John and Peter and the ladies who had applied for the AMSA job. On the last day I had come to a decision and when John phoned me I told him I had got the right person.
'Don't decide yet', said John, 'I have one more lady I'd like you to talk to before you decide.'
Ten minutes talking to Margot Seitelman had disposed of my natural half loyalty to the other lady to whom I had almost promised the job. Margot was as obviously the woman as John was obviously the man we were going to have to depend on if this unlikely venture was to have a chance.
I left for England pleased and confident, my head buzzing with plans, ambitions and the certitude that Mensa was going to become a permanent and ubiquitous organisation.
Margot Seitelman took the job because, as a young mother of three, she could do it from her home without giving up her other career. And it is still from her home, despite the remarkable growth over the years of American Mensa, that she has continued to work. As the staff expanded she took on more apartments in the big apartment black in Brooklyn where she still lives. Today, 'Mensa, Brooklyn New York' is all the address you need if you want a letter to be in one of the sacks delivered to Margot's home every day.
America took to Mensa and the American 'branch' became bigger than the whole 'tree' and up till 1984 remains bigger than the rest of Mensa put together.
On 19 November the Annual Gathering heard of my American trip at the Russell Hotel and this time 250 members crowded in. A packed general meeting approved of what I described as a dangerous phase in the life cycle of the Mensa 'cell' as it went through its first mitosis and division.
'Clearly', I told my Mensa colleagues, whose numbers and keenness were both growing with the successes, 'Professor Burt's idea of a panel of people scientifically selected for high intelligence can have no connection with national boundaries. How do we cope with this from an organisational point of view?'
I went on to outline the structure I proposed for the formation of an international body: 'The duty of Mensa International will be to found and support Mensas in other countries in such a way as to preserve a linkage with a central body ... Mensa International should not exert any influence on the activities of the National Mensa but should confine itself to ensuring the maintenance of Mensa's uncommitted stance and to keeping recruitment methods as nearly uniform as possible. It should also ensure its own financial stability and viability, and those of various national Mensas.'
The work continued and the enlarged committee gradually worked on the managerial structures we needed to keep Mensa together despite its sprawling and erratic growth. Joyce Mumford had given up running the British (and international) office from her home and I persuaded an energetic young woman, Mrs Hayes, who ran the clerical service and duplicating pool at the big wood company where I was a manager, to set up an operation in her home.
She ran this for some years with the help of spare-time neighbouring housewives in Rainham, Essex. It was an economical setup, similar to the one Margot was setting up in her New York home.
The Rainham office continued until it grew out of Mrs Hayes's home and I passed the job to a Mr Reginald Candy, a retired business man who filled his large house in Eltham with a buzzing group of part-time lady clerks as the job grew.
An interesting thing about these early offices is that there seems to be no end to the stream of enquiries which, many, many years later, come to them from people reading ancient magazines in many places round the world. A recent letter was passed on to me. It was from a man in New York. He acknowledged a letter telling him he had succeeded in the preliminary test. He reported that he had been thinking it over and had decided that he would now like to lake the supervised test. This was not a man who allows himself to be rushed into impulsive decisions. He had been turning the matter over in his careful mind for twenty-three years.
At the 1962 AGM I reported something else. Things were beginning to move in Europe, no doubt as a reflection of the publicity in London and New York.
It was in Holland that I accepted an offer from a retired naval officer to try to set up an MSA for Europe and he took this as an irrevocable franchise which he was to hold in perpetuity, regardless of results. This error proved to be damaging for a long time, but we overcame it.
By the time 1962 was out we had divided the Mensa Committee into British and International roles, we had taken Codella and Sturgeon on to the International Committee and Eric Hills was working out an International Constitution which would conform to the structure I suggested and to the successful practices which we had built up and modified through the year. There were already in outline three national Mensas to fit into the form we were building.
Peter Sturgeon came to the London AGM that November to report on the first results of the New York office. Already there were 641 American members and the independent American journal, The American Activities Bulletin, had been set going and was circulating to growing skein of members in every one of the United States. It went out as some pages inside the international journal which we sent to every member.
The British meeting was held at the Conway Hall and the Annual Lecture was by the very distinguished biologist, Sir Peter Medawar. It was a brilliant appreciation of the work of the British pioneer philosopher of science Professor W. Whewell.
At the, by then, traditional Marlow picnic: at the Summer Solstice, that year I met Marianne Tanon, a French student, later Madame Seydoux, who went off back to France when she had finished her studies and founded French Mensa, which has continued, a little erratically to be sure, in its own light, humorous, Gallic way, ever since.
Austrian Mensa, always one of the most stable and reliable, started when a short dynamic young man who had been an officer in the British Army during the war joined Mensa from Austria and wrote to me from his office in Vienna where as a psychologist he ran a successful management selection operation serving Austrian industrialists. Dr Georg Fischhof is the Founder of Austrian Mensa. He was then and is now much more so, a famous man in his country and his work both in building up and supporting Austrian Mensa and in giving sensible and practical psychological guidance to International Mensa has been invaluable.
He started by doing successfully what Berrill had thought of, but failed to implement. He was testing the intelligence of candidates for jobs as part of his service and, whenever any candidate got a score over the threshold, he would issue an invitation to join. At various times we found it difficult to get supplies of tests because of the suspicions of the professional psychologists of our activities, but Georg broke through the problems and supplied us.
This might be the point to mention an underlying Mensa recruitment problem which I had to overcome then and which has dogged us ever since. It causes a sort of schizophrenia in suppliers of mental tests because of the conflict between the professional ethics and the desire to sell us very large number of test forms.
The preliminary stage, the self-supervised home test is not mandatory but is a fiscally valuable part of our procedure. It is also useful as a means to give confidence to many applicants who are mistakenly unsure of themselves. However, the psychology profession frowns on mental tests which are not administered personally by a skilled practitioner. It is thought also that any test sent through the post loses its validity because it is possible for the answers to become known to the public. From the Mensa point of view this does not matter since we only offer membership to those who have had a supervised test. In practice the problem has been solved by using a small number of rather obsolescent tests for the preliminary stage. The authors of these are usually pleased to have the royalties and prefer not to know about what would be seen as the misuse of the tests from the strictly professional point of view. My hope for the future is that we may be able to organise the computer supervision of tests in such a way as to satisfy all interests.
1963 saw the Mensa Correspondence and the American Bulletin go into letterpress font, and Sir Cyril Burt launched the Premises Fund which was set up to raise money for a permanent headquarters in London. The fund proved abortive because of the lopsided way that Mensa grew.
On 15 June 1963 there was the first American Annual Gathering and it was a huge, unexpected and heartening success with 160 members at this first American transplant of Berrill's institution. An American Mensa Committee was democratically accepted. In the same month was the very first meeting of Dutch Mensa in Holland. In October I announced a world membership of 2,623, and developments in France, Germany, Holland and America.
Toronto which was then part of North American Mensa' had also had meetings. Later Canadian Mensa preferred a separate identity and a separate National Mensa was formed.
The 1963 Annual Gathering in London at the Conway Hall included a Mensa Artists' exhibition and was shown on television. The Annual Lecturer was a fellow member of the Philosophy of Science Society, Sir Karl Popper.
Professor Popper's conditions when I asked him to lecture were stringent. He proclaimed himself to be so deeply allergic to tobacco smoke that he wanted a guarantee, not only that no one should smoke white he spoke but that there should have been no smoking for two days before in the lecture hall. He indicated that the faintest whiff of tobacco smoke would bring him to the ground in paroxysms.
I was his chairman and I sounded the warning by asking the audience earnestly not to steal the briefest whiff. To reinforce my words there were enormous 'NO SMOKING' notices at every hand, whose format had been specified by the great Professor himself.
Sir Karl was at his splendid best, he gave us an unforgettable two hours of the original, scene-changing wisdom which has had such a deep effect on Western science and philosophy. He answered with the expected brilliance many eager questions and he never even cleared his throat or coughed. Not once. Which was odd.
Why? Because an undisciplinable, anarchic Mensa lady was behind me on the platform, in a beautiful long black dress, eyeing the audience severely through a lorgnette. She was, either through inadvertence or from sheer mischief, chain-smoking behind the great man's unconscious back throughout the lecture. Should I intervene and draw attention or should I ignore her and hope that Karl would survive unspluttering? Wise, it turned out, was my masterly inactivity. The great man's professorial throat was not even cleared.
1964 was the last year of uncomplicated progress, but the seeds of trouble planted in earlier mistakes and overconfidence began to sprout and grow. Eric Hill's International Constitution was accepted by the overwhelming vote of the members and the international structure ratified. The first international election was held. The British membership was a little over 4,000. With an international panel of candidates I stood for election as the first International General Secretary, with Joe Wilson as the pioneer International Chairman in the first Mensa International Election. The Wilson/Serebriakoff panel of candidates was elected by a large majority against another American slate which immediately challenged the result and called for a second election. We decided that this was not justified. Growing opposition came from an ambitious American group who felt they might be able to take control. There was opposition from two contradictory directions.
A British group still wanted to challenge the new constitution on legal grounds because the original Berrill constitution had no provision for amendment. They wanted to govern the society from the Annual General Meeting in London.
The other group were simply ambitious to take over this big new toy from those they saw as the lucky incompetents who had stumbled upon the idea.
The reason for the 'slate' or 'panel' system was that we could see no way in which a mixed group from several countries could meet regularly as a committee inside a foreseeable budget. We had built up Mensa with a co-operating team and we thought members could select from a range of such teams who could offer themselves In the future. Even today this system has survived several fairly radical constitutional amendments and still seems to me to be right for Mensa.
Before that election, in June, Eric Hills and I were invited by new American chairman Codella to attend the second American Mensa Annual Gathering in New York. John wanted Eric to explain the new Constitution because of the objections that were being made in America where there was a demand for an American-type constitution. John Codella also wanted to create another big publicity success such as he had made from my first brief stop in New York. The trip was to be self-financing because publicity brings enquiries, brings cash.
He had done a very professional job again. He was there with Peter and Margot at the airport and they whisked us away in a car explaining all the way the constantly modified programme of radio, television, newspaper and magazine interviews they planned.
The magazine Life had allocated a very clever, pretty and witty young woman reporter to me full-time for four days. I myself could spare only a few days on that trip but Eric Hills did a more extended publicity tour of the East Coast with lots of radio and television exposure. My own exposure to publicity in New York was by far the most intensive I had ever had.
The Life article which followed was a four-page feature which, with all the other stories and broadcasts on Eric and me, brought in an even greater flood of enquiries to Margot's assembly of neighbouring wives who were brought in to help in the crisis.
In 1964 the membership of American Mensa hit 1,400 in June whilst we were in New York. Largely as a result of that trip and of the intense and well organised coping by Margot and john Codella when the flood of applications hit, the membership topped 4,400 by the next June. Already American Mensa was bigger than its parent, British Mensa.
But despite its obvious brilliant success and the surplus revenue it created for American Mensa, our tour marked the beginning of the anti-Codella drive in American Mensa. When it was successful the movement spread to Europe and became an anti-establishment and an anti-Serebriakoff movement.
It was what happened to Berrill all over again. It is during the 'up' phases of growth and development that opposition grows fierce and clamorous. In the bad times of decline, confusion and muddle the critics and politicians are strangely passive and full of strenuous and determined apathy.
June 1965 saw a Founder's Meeting in Frankfurt Germany. we had found a young psychologist, Dr Herbert Steiner, a friend of Georg Fischof, who got things going actively in Germany and became the German Founder. Marianne Seydoux and Rosemary Bertrand were there from France, Sam Naber from Holland, Sturgeon from America, Edouard Valencyns from Belgium and 'Hans' Eberstark, the extraordinary linguist and calculating genius who represented Switzerland.
In America the Annual Gathering was an even bigger success with 275 members from 22 States at the Biltmore Hotel in New York. But the new American Committee had some members who were to participate in the contention that was soon to come.
'If you have a good formula stick to it' was the principle that Codella tried to follow. He began to plan to follow up the great success of the Serebriakoff publicity tours by having myself and my wife do a three week American tour in October. But by now there was real opposition in Britain and many thought that I was getting too much of the limelight. Surely American Mensa was big enough already? But after strong contention, the committee decided positively after a narrow postal vote. The trip was on.
The result was up to the wildest expectations and American Mensa got an even greater number of applications and another 3,000 members.
What was I on to? Why the unexpected success in several lands? John Codella was an extremely able publicist and Mensa was a new idea but new ideas usually have to fight for a hearing. And I had no Codella in London or Holland. I must be touching a sensitive nerve. I must be offering something, that somehow was wanted. Something was being said that people secretly wanted said, even if they laughed at it a little. I came to a conclusion upon which I have acted with some success ever since.
For many centuries, ideas of the equality of man would have been considered ridiculous. But, in the last two hundred years we had had a brief age during which, in order to break the over-rigid mould of a stratified society, there had been the spread in all the advanced nations of a new egalitarian ethos. This was a sort of re-zeroing or datum setting. It was an operation to reset a status system which was no longer suited to the new sort of productive industrial society with its dependence on the widespread decentralisation of control and initiative.
What the unexpected attraction of the Mensa idea might be, I thought, was that it presented a partial counter-thrust to the over-egalitarian trend which was beginning, as all such trends do, to overshoot itself. Was the egalitarian pendulum swinging too far? Were intelligent observers beginning to feel safer seeing at least, though not yet accepting, a counter-trend movement, if only as a target for abuse.
I was in a world which had gained in long life, health and prosperity wherever it had implemented the amplification of intelligence which comes with modem scientific industrialism. Trying to feel what nerve it was I had touched in that world, I asked whether the idea of a scientifically and therefore objectively selected elite, not of wealth and privilege but of mental excellence rang a chord? At least it was not incompatible with the ideas of a centrally-planned socialist society which had so much attracted me in the confused times, the ideological wars and the industrial depressions through which I had lived. My Mensa experiences seemed to be a betrayal of all my former ideas; contrary to that which inspired the active work in politics and as a trade union leader in my earlier years.
The trip was extremely well-organised by the indefatigable Codella, everything slotted into place, and though we were rushed there was no waste of time. Many of the media people praised the organisation and echoed the words of the top reporter on the Montreal Star, Dusty Wineberg: 'Best damned publicity handout I ever did see.' This was the talent that a handful of Mensa politicians were so scornfully to drive away in a couple of years. That was what slowed the meteoric growth in America for some years.
Only in New York did we encounter anything but the kindly warmth that is America to the traveller. In a nasty political meeting there, the ordinary members were puzzled and shocked by the emerging ambitious Mensa politicians who were rude to Win and tried with little success to heckle me. I had learned my trade the hard way in my political and trade union youth.
After this extravaganza all over America, which John Codella told me brought more than 50,000 enquiries and 4,000 members, I went back to meet mounting troubles in Mensa in Britain. The political pot was beginning to boil and the pamphleteers were getting to work.
Mensa leaders in several places and times have had problems with litigious straw men.
These are men (or women) with few assets to risk on costs but the intelligence, dottiness, and zeal to bring and pursue self-represented legal actions against Mensa or its officials, either for the fun of it, or because of persecution mania (perhaps born of under-achiever's envy). A tiny handful of such people have been an extremely damaging plague in Mensa. We have things better arranged now as we are insured against this kind of thing.
The small but highly active political group that assembled was an international one. It was brought together by the growing Mensa internal communications system. All over Mensa, Local groups were being started by one local member appointed as the Local Secretary by the national centre, in accordance with the scheme set up by Maurice Salzedo and perfected by Eric Hills. Most of these groups produced a local newsletter of some kind and this was the media of communication of the pamphleteers. Lists of names and addresses of local groups secretaries and the editors of the many scores of little duplicated magazines that were beginning to proliferate were available to every member. Sending duplicated pamphlets and scandal-sheets to these key communicators was simple. The local editors were always fascinated to hear what seemed like inside scandals about the leading Mensa names they were beginning to recognise. Spicy gossip was eagerly reprinted by local editors who were always looking for interesting copy to till their columns. They had no means of checking the facts, saw smoke and thought it meant fire.
In America particularly the local journals were subsidised by the National Committee because there were so many local groups that they could no longer be served by a single national journal. There was not the space to print details of all the meetings that were being called each month as the number of local chapters proliferated. The system was wide open to exploitation by the inventive and malicious scandal-monger. The group of political opportunists who pioneered this way of spreading distrust of the elected officers was small but its activists were zealous and dedicated and some of them were quite without scruples.
The limitation was that the conflict was mercifully confined to written abuse and mischief making. A vigorous and damaging war of letters and pamphlets went on which was as intriguing to all the participants as it was damaging to the society but there was no physical strife. Threats? Yes. Lawsuits? Some. Insulting letters? Lots! Press scandals? Yes. Knife fights? Broken pates? Bruises? Slapped faces? Tweaked noses? Pulled beards? Boringly, no sign! Even today, after nearly forty years with occasional bouts of happily vigorous, highly effective, well-directed and unrestrained mutual written abuse among a tiny minority, Mensa is still waiting with vanishing hope for the thrill of its first black eye. Mensa's production of jaw-jaw is fair for such societies. Its war-war output is abysmal. But the virulence of the poison in the pens and on the typewriter ribbons in the coming period was extreme. Those that do not want to get warm were advised, by Truman, to keep out of the kitchen. In 1965/7 the kitchen my colleagues and I were In became very very warm indeed. I stayed but my wiser colleagues paradoxically took the risk of spoiling the broth by resigning as cooks in such an overheated kitchen.
Another curious thing is that the abuse, libel and insults were not only non-violent but inaudible, entirely on paper. The member that would accuse one, in a letter, of having one's political opponents committed to a lunatic asylum, would in a face to face meeting be courteous if not charming. I speak of something that really happened.
So just as everything looked set for world-wide expansion at the external level, on the internal level things became extremely fraught and messy. As a result Mensa went into neutral gear for some years.
There were three characters at the centre of the opposition group in the bad days. They called themselves the Three Musketeers, and soon gathered a band of supporters, most of them deceived, round them as they began to make a mark. All three being only intermittently employed or unemployed and having the useful litigious man of straw status, they dedicated themselves to the task of discrediting the incumbents whoever they were and taking control of what the pioneer group were beginning to build up. Using the 'the repeated big lie' technique, the group were able to exploit the normal, 'no smoke without fire' reaction to scandal so that by a narrow margin they succeeded in showing that the 'Establishment' was not that well 'entrenched', and evicting it, whereupon their own nominees took over. But much mud had stuck to the Musketeers themselves so wisely they did not become candidates themselves.
Shall we call the Musketeers by their fictional names?
Porthos was an American, who at face-to-face contact was pleasant enough, plausible, even charming. He gave a surface impression of good manners and intelligence. They say that he flew into rages and was screamingly abusive but I never saw that in my few contacts with him. His effectiveness was largely due to this apparent decency on superficial acquaintance. It was difficult to convince people that this apparently pleasant young man could be guilty of the things of which his many victims accused him. So he was always able, in an organisation like Mensa, to find a new circle, when the old one found him out, who could see him as the victim he claimed to be.
He first appeared in an American group where, correspondents tell me, he met any opposition with fierce rages. He wrote letters of intemperate, abusive threats to anyone who thwarted him and circulated them widely. His grip on reality was not strong and his posture in life was that of a victim who was engaged in a fight for survival against powerful, relentless enemies for whom no punishment was too severe and against whom any methods were legitimate. It is probable that he was sincere and believed his own fantasies. His weakness was that his innocent front could never hold for long and all the associates he was able so easily to recruit found him out eventually and joined those he saw as the vicious enemies who constantly ringed him.
Athos was, in a way, an English version of the same sort of personality. Face to face he was more than personable, he was quite charming and had no difficulty in securing a long chain of jobs which never lasted. One of his false charges about me was that I had played some sinister part in his losing jobs. He had a flair for language and could write very well. This was useful for a dedicated mischief-maker. Again, he could always charm a new circle of supporters as soon as he disenchanted an old one. He would have made an effective confidence trickster since he had had a good middle class education and the style and manner of a gentleman.
Aramis was a shadowy figure from Kansas City whom I never met. I first heard of him because apparently he had, in the easy early enthusiastic days, been given the 'franchise', as it were, as Locsec in the town and had eventually been pushed aside by local members wen his character had been revealed. A feud arose between two Mensa sects in Kansas City which rumbled on for years. He was a leader of a faction which opposed the recognised group. The Aramis faction published one of the scandal sheets called 'Skulduggery' in which I featured as a vicious and unscrupulous profiteer tyrant.
These were 'The Three' that saw themselves as the bold riders who were to bring down first Codella (and they made his life so uncomfortable with incessant attacks that he did wisely resign). Then it was, 'We Three Ride Again ', against the Establishment. Later as they gained ground they were joined by a succession of other figures who came and went in a loose mutually quarreling group that was in effect a political party with take-over aims. Their first political action was to set up and try to get recognition for a Special Interest Group.
While Mensa has no collective aims or purposes it does encourage those with various points of view, aims or interests to use Mensa to find others like them and form meeting and corresponding groups. The Musketeers asked for recognition of 'Special Interest Group for Reform in Mensa', and it became known as SIGRIM.
Mistakenly, I think, but understandably, the American Committee under Codella 's leadership were reluctant to give credence and publicity to this group by granting them official recognition, and their refusal to 'recognise' SIGRIM constituted the first political cause by which they could attract the sympathy and attention of members in general. I began to receive protest letters about the autocratic methods of the American Committee and the illiberal way in which they were trying to suppress legitimate political opposition.
SIGRIM and their supporters nominated an opposition panel in the 1964 international election upon which Porthos appeared as a candidate for international office. One of the candidates wrote from the prestigious Hudson Institute. He complained that his acceptance of nomination had never been obtained. He had signed a document which he had thought was simply a record of the names and addresses of the people at a meeting. This panel put up a case against the international constitution attacking the panel system which had just been accepted. In the 1964 election, they got thirteen percent of the votes cast in a low poll. They raised an enormous rumpus afterwards on various grounds, demanding a new election because of imagined irregularities and those minor real ones which cannot possibly be avoided in a postal election involving many countries and people.
By the time I wrote my article, 'On having your head turned', after the success of the American tour in 1964, signs of opposition were growing as SIGRIM began to circularise members and groups all over the world and write endless letters of protest to all those who were active.
Athos began, with the agreement of the new British Committee, to publish a regular column in the monthly magazine and in this he began, systematically, to undermine reputations in various ways. A concern for the truth was something that never bothered Athos. He wanted his tales to be credible, spicy and interesting.
It was the convergence of two strands of opposition that became formidable to the new and rather isolated International Committee that I was trying to get going. One of them was legitimate and honest. It was simply a group of those who did not want or agree with my ambitious international expansion schemes and my strong desire for the one-head unity of Mensa. The group was English and its aims and methods were at all times decent, they were just an early version of the consolidators who are always with us opposing initiative and adventure. There must be balance between the expansionists and the consolidators in any institution.
The other group, SIGRIM and its associates, wanted to take over control of International Mensa and in 1967 they actually succeeded, in an oblique way, in doing so. The years between 1964 and 1967 were the worst.
As I have said Mensa was then a natural Aunt Sally for the press in an egalitarian age. I have to admit that I would not have expected that a society with our pretensions would have had to pass, even in its formative stages, through such a period on its learning curve. But Mensa did.
Having a good brain does not ensure good will and, as a fair sample of the intelligent people on earth, Mensa aims to contain, and does contain, its fair proportion of malicious and destructive people and bright psychopaths. Further we have a few members who suffer from emotional retardation despite their good intelligence. Our trouble is that when those of ill will are mentally able they are capable of more than normal mischief. Mensa, beginning to be a world wide group, was learning how to cope with that particular problem. Now we still suffer from the same symptoms but we can cope.
Now follows my own account, for myself and my friends, of what happened in Mensa. It was not meant for general publication at the time. I shall disguise some names for fear of litigious men of straw. It is an edited version of what I wrote in 1967, just before I and my panel of candidates were defeated, getting 35 percent of votes as opposed to 46 percent for the SIGRIM panel in a three-cornered election.
Mensa has always had reformers, a minority who want to modify and improve us. Others would, very naturally, like to replace the present team of workers. That is as it should be in a democratic society.
But of late some of those who are ambitious to take over, seem to have decided that the incumbents are so firmly entrenched that there is no hope of replacing them by honourable democratic political means. They have resorted to extreme methods and I feel I should tell about them. If you are one of those who feel that legitimate politics includes announcing your opponent's death, challenging people to duels, sending poison-pen letters under false names to opponent's employers, starting untruthful press scandals which bring Mensa a bad name, making false accusations of dishonesty and fraud to the police and other authorities, and making physical threats to Mensa employees: if all this seems good thinking and fair boxing to you then the rest of what I write might bore you. If you feel that such actions are marginally uncivil or even unkind then read on, I have a sad and comic tale to tell you, one which I would not have expected to be possible of a society with our pretensions.
The tale I have to tell is surprising and amusing but is not concerned with important events. Who runs Mensa is, so far, hardly a vital question of world-shaking importance. The actions, though ill-intentioned, have caused little real harm.
It is the bizarre story of a group of Mensans who set out to take control but find themselves playing the buffoons in a grotesque farce. Their maliciousness proves itself to be so incompetent as to excite more laughter than indignation.
The actions of the 'reform' group SIGRIM are marked by untruthfulness, rudeness, muddle and internal quarrels, but above all by incompetence so extreme that there almost seems to be a self-defeating deliberate quality about it. They are, to a man, loudmouths giving themselves away to each other and to those they see as their common 'enemies': the elected officers and workers on committees. They all accuse each other, with justice, of being extremists and are so busy misinforming each other and everybody else that they finish by believing their own untruths as they come back to them in distorted form.
The actions of SIGRIM have severely damaged Mensa's credit, they have caused many resignations especially among the active workers they have harassed and there is no doubt that the recent pause in the growth of Mensa can be put at their door both because of the bad publicity and because they make life too hot for those volunteers who work for Mensa.
We may never have known the full extent of SIGRIM activity and of the damage that has been done if they had not fallen to quarreling among themselves. Some of them, unable to stomach the methods of some others have at last 'let the cat out of the bag' and revealed an inside story that has been concealed.
A copy of one of their broadsheets in August contains a revealing quotation published by Porthos. Speaking of the International Committee he writes: 'There is very little that can be ruled out of order in overthrowing them.' Much of what I report can be better understood in the context of this revealing sentence.
The underlying policy of SIGRIM has been to subject the pioneer workers and the elected officers, no matter who they are, one by one, on a pre-arranged rota, to an unremitting campaign of harassment, of untruthful and libellous attacks so as to force their resignation.
Few people who have established a good position in life can afford to hold out against such a campaign. Such tactics, however, are safe for the misfits and under-achievers who are the strike force of SIGRIM. They have little to lose and much to gain in this kind of contest. The remaining rump of the attacked incumbents is weakened by the consequent resignations: they do become less efficient and make some legitimate errors for which they can be fairly criticised. The voluntary workers who have to endure such harassment while they give their spare time to build up Mensa have to ask themselves why they should put up with it. The obvious answer is that they should not. And they resign, thus creating a vacuum at the top. The 'reformers' find it easy to move into key positions and some of them have done so in America.
The most effective and able Mensa builder in North America and the first American Chairman, John Codella, with virtually all the American pioneer group, have been driven to resignation in this way by this long campaign of energetic and unscrupulous harassment. Codella, and many other American Mensa pioneers have folded their tents and departed from these undignified scuffles and somewhat crazed behaviour.
On a personal level I do not complain. The underlying, almost deliberate, incompetence of the actions intended to harm me has prevented any real damage beyond the fact that in my obstinate persistence and refusal to give up I have had to waste a lot of time on the sterile and damaging nonsense which I shall describe.
My first contact with the SIGRIM character Athos was an idiosyncratic letter in which he offered to take over responsibility for publicity in Mensa. He left me kicking my heels in the pub where I agreed to meet him to discuss his offer. No show then, but much published criticism because I had failed to accept his offer. His next action was a nomination submitted to me as Secretary in which he nominated himself for all eight of the positions on the British Committee. I replied as one does to an arcane legpull only to have a long, serious letter in which he made a case that his nomination was valid and must be accepted. He was elected on an unopposed panel in 1964 but was bottom of the poll at the next election. Athos is the British end of SIGRIM. His skill is in innuendo and reasonably credible but false accusations. Fiscal irresponsibility, threatening opponents with violence, undermining the confidence of employers in opponents and bringing lawsuits against them are all accusations which, without the remotest justification, flow easily from the multicoloured pens in the neat italic script of the inventive Athos.
Porthos hit the national headlines in America when he challenged another member to a duel over a girl and told the press. He could be called 'The Threatener'. To me he wrote, 'There are enough people who are thoroughly dissatisfied to make a mess of things if you don't start dealing with them directly.' To Jules Singer (who succeeded Codella as Chairman in America) he wrote, '... if you continue as Chairman I intend you to realise that what Codella got was sheer joy compared with what can be done ...' He published an article in a scandal sheet called 'The Death of John Codella' which did not add to the peace of mind of John's family. This was the beginning of a planned campaign of harassment which was revealed when correspondence about it was leaked by the associate I mentioned who could not stomach his extreme methods. Thus John, that most effective worker, was accused unjustly of making money out of Mensa, of censorship, or stealing from Mensa funds and of anything else that came into the accuser's mind. John stoically took this nonsense for a time and then gave up and resigned with effect that can easily be seen in the recruitment and surplus cash figures in American Mensa.
Next the attack switched to the other members on the pioneer American Committee who have all been under similar attack and all have resigned. Even one member of their own group, Bob Sokol, resigned after threats of violence as was revealed in the letter which circulated in the SIGRIM group that was published by the one who became disenchanted and gave the game away.
It was at this time that the internal Mensa disputes hit the national headlines in Britain and America. The SIGRIM group discovered that it was easy to attract publicity in the Mensa context that they could never get in any other way. The good news is that the press are unduly interested in Mensa. The bad news is also that the press are unduly interested in Mensa. They are delighted to find, in the action of a few of our oddballs, a fair case to ridicule what they can present as pretentiousness. Some reporters were quick to believe and publish imaginative tales by Porthos and Athos of fierce internal disputes within a society which seemed to be claiming superiority. To the central group in SIGRIM it was wonderful to see their names in print for a change. The damage to Mensa was no worry. I was astonished that quite reputable newspapers did nothing to check what were highly unlikely tales before they were published. I conducted a long campaign later with one of them which ended in a full retraction and my becoming friends with a top columnist who gave us a lot of good publicity afterwards.
In June 1966 there were reports of a fracas at the American AG resulting from SIGRIM floor motions for amendments to the International Constitution and which got bad, nation-wide publicity in America. Then there came in England what remains my worst moment in a long career at the hectic centre of things in Mensa.
My own and Mensa's low point came about like this. It was the British Annual Gathering at the French Institute in Kensington. The now separate British Mensa Committee was to have Arthur Koestler as the Annual Lecturer on the Sunday. British members of SIGRIM led by Athos had moved a motion of no confidence in the depleted International Committee on which I was the leader and General Secretary. My team consisted of a few British, some Americans and many other national representatives. The working team had been reduced by the harassment resignations to the point that I was the only one in England who could be present to speak for it.
On the morning of the Saturday of the Annual General Meeting my heart sank as I read my copy of The Times. 'EGGHEADS HEADING FOR TROUBLE. AMERICANS MAY JOIN IN SCRAP.'
Athos had convinced a Times reporter of the credibility of an inventive story from Porthos that 'an aircraft load of American members', would fly in for 'the showdown'.
Athos publicly castigated the IGC for 'financial profligacy' and 'administrative incompetence' and evidently unsuccessful, 'attempts to gag valid criticism'.
They quoted me as saying that grievances would be aired and that I looked forward to the battle with zest. I was lying. I looked forward to the rumpus and bad publicity for the strange society I had tried to build up as one looks forward to 'dying for days over the small fire'. The British Committee banned the press but there were reporters everywhere taking down all that the various contending groups had to say outside the meeting.
There was, of course, no truth in the tale about the American contingent nor in the other arguments that were produced by Athos and others. I was the sole speaker for the International Committee and I did not do well. A crowded, confused AGM after a press scandal is no place to deal with confidently stated untruths such as the IGC had a serious deficit and had raided a non-existent trust fund. The members did not know till the next accounts were published that there was a comfortable surplus and no such fund.
I have never felt more alone in my life as I stood there trying to answer a dozen ridiculous untruthful charges which were sprung upon me.
Unfortunately the honest British faction joined in the attack on the IGC and the motion of 'no confidence' was passed. That, I am sure, was part of the reason why my faction lost the next election. The British AG had the prestige of the Mensa founding country and, although there were subsequent motions of confidence from the Swiss, American and Canadian AGMs when the facts came out, the damage was done.
A final blow on that rotten day was that Arthur Koestler, put off by the bad publicity, cancelled his lecture causing further dismay to the British Committee.
I staggered away from this meeting and tried not to read the many garbled press reports. In a moment of weakness I confess I did feel that I had been subjected to a real injustice. After years of unpaid, enthusiastic and successful work I had to endure a severe and unjustified public humiliation. But remembering the undue adulation I had had from many kindly Mensa groups around the world I suppose this undue disgrace left me with an undue credit balance of regard. The advice from Win (who resigned from Mensa in disgust), and an my friends, was to follow Codella and the others and give up the struggle.
But I took the advice of Bernard Shaw, 'Never resign', and with foolish obstinacy which I have never regretted, I simply prepared for the next battle which I lost. The war, in the oddest way, I eventually won.
The motion by one national branch upon the International Committee was not binding, of course. So when the triumphant SIGRIM faction found out to their surprise that I intended to soldier on and ignore the letters they sent demanding my resignation, they redoubled the harassment.
We were coming up to the next IGC election so the press campaign of scandals intensified. A Sunday Times article early in 1967, 'VIOLENCE THREAT IN MENSA FEUD', arose from Athos who claimed that he was phoned by the representative of a 'dreary clutch of bully boys' and threatened with violence if he did not resign. The newspaper also quoted the editor of the Mensa journal who called Athos 'An oily tongued rascal', in his resignation Editorial mentioned later.
There was much newspaper talk of the two factions in Mensa and the feud between them but at that time the 'faction' in British Mensa was myself and a tiny bunch of persona! friends. I would have been glad of even a 'dreary clutch of bully boys' on my side if they had existed anywhere but in poor Athos's imagination, over-excited as it was by his successes.
A nation-wide television programme, 'Panorama', featured Athos, Peter Goodman, the Mensa Journal editor, Eric Hills and the new British Chairman, Bill Lovett, and myself after this 'violence threat' publicity. There was an innocuous exchange which bore out my theory that even the Mensans with the most vitriolic pens tend to be polite to other Mensa faces. We were truthfully told by the perceptive Kenneth Robinson that we were like a 'lot of old ladies quarreling over their teacups'. The only unboring part was when Goodman was asked why he called Athos an, 'oily tongued rascal'. He replied with admirable simplicity, 'because he is'. Athos wisely said nothing to this or about anything much on the programme. Afterwards, at a grisly party on BBC whisky in the green room, he calmly told me that Porthos and Aramis were planning to send damaging letters to the company of which I was by that time a director. This was to be part of the harassment campaign if I would not resign. He said that it was all the plan of an American Sigrimite and that he was mad.
I had heard something like this already from a young member. He told Win of a plot to send my firm a letter denying, 'the rumour' that my son was a juvenile delinquent and that my thirteen year old daughter had had two abortions. These letters were not sent as far as I know. To prepare them I had to tell my children of this threat. My son, now a policeman, took it phlegmatically since he is about as undelinquent as one could imagine, but my daughter was very upset. 'What a lot of liars', she cried, 'I'm nearly fifteen!' Denying the false rumour was of course just telling the truth. Who can be blamed for that? But poison pen letters were sent and some of them had just that form predicted, creating suspicion by denying accusations.
I was refusing all the rather more friendly overtures from the over-confident SIGRIM faction that I was receiving and persistently refusing to resign or, 'deal with them direct'. Their problem was that although a lot of people were afraid of them and their methods, they had so smirched their own reputations that they had no hope of being actually elected. They hoped to dominate those that were. It was this weakness that led to their total defeat in the end.
In March 1967 my employer sent for me and silently dropped in front of me an airmail letter from America. It purported to come from a member. It accused me of stealing money from my firm and from Mensa and covering up my defalcations. It was the first of five similar letters, all based on internal evidence from the same source.
I had been with my firm for many years and had a good reputation. But a Chairman has his responsibilities and I was subjected to some questioning before he confirmed his immediate reaction of angry rejection of such a malicious libel. He wrote a supportive letter to the addresses given on that and the other four such letters saying that dishonesty was not something of which any one who had known me for any time could possibly suspect me. The letters all came back from the false addresses that had been given. The purported writers were not to be traced on the American Mensa files.
As the new few letters arrived over a period of a couple of weeks, some affirming and some denying the 'rumours' about my 'malfeasances', the Chairman sent for me each time and, holding the letter by one corner with a handkerchief, with his face averted and his nose held, dropped them in front of me announcing, 'another letter from your fan club'.
Friends in America that I told about it wrote to say that only a certain SIGRIM member could have done such a thing. But when we got the facts later we discovered that Athos and maybe some others were in the plot. Certainly it was Athos who supplied my firm's address and some of the wordings, as was made clear by the revelation of Andy Di Cyan of Chicago Mensa.
During that hectic period in the run up to the 1967 international election the harassment continued and I found that I had no time to continue the development of Mensa. I was up to my neck in counteracting the problems that were being arranged for me, trying to get together a panel of sufficiently tough-minded candidates and running an election campaign. To add to my troubles a report was made to the Fraud Squad in England by the SIGRIM faction and another to the Board of Trade. In New York there were similar attempts to cause official suspicion. It took all my time to deal with them. However there was no evidence to support the accusations and the malice was patent and demonstrable. There was an abrupt cessation of this kind of attack when enquiries bounced back in the faces of the instigators.
Chicago Mensa has, since the start, published a magazine called Chime (CHIcago MEnsa) and at the time the Editor was a very serious young man called Andy Di Cyan with whom I had been having a fairly acrimonious but decent correspondence. He co-operated and sympathised with the SIGRIM group and attacked me largely for the fault of 'supporting Codella', who had become the butt of many emotionally anti-establishment members in America. Let it be said in fairness that Codella had not always handled the many opposition factions very well and, being an entrepreneurial type, was inclined to be autocratic. He made enemies, not all of them among the crazy fringe I have been describing. Mensa needs its Codellas. It has to get used to ways of using them without being used by them.
Mensa owes much to the honesty and decency of Andy Di Cyan because it was he who had the courage that undoubtedly was needed to blow the whistle on the Three Musketeers when he repudiated them as associates.
REFORM YES! DISHONOUR NEVER! was the title of Andy's article in Chime in which he attacked Porthos for discrediting the reform movement in his methods.
He accused the SIGRIM members of being responsible for the poison-pen letters to my company and revealed his evidence in the form of a long rambling letter which had been circulating among the central SIGRIM group with each recipient adding his own comments, copying and passing on. Athos had clearly been the source of the address of my firm and in his own unmistakably oblique style gave instructions about the actions which he had himself foretold.
Athos started the letter by saying that his suspicions as to how he had lost his last two jobs were deepening into certainty but he disapproved of others suffering in the same way so he asked Aramis 'NOT to send anonymous letters to the Chairman of the Board of Directors and to the Chief Accountant (each letter being marked 'Private and Confidential'), and here the name and address of my firm is given, 'concerning one of the directors of the company (though God knows he deserves it)'.
Later in this long rambling letter another SIGRIM member is reported to have passed on a suggestion that he should write a letter to my firm denying my daughter's abortions, my son's delinquency and my own embezzlements.
Athos goes on: 'Now it is obvious that Porthos wouldn't dream of sending anonymous letters to VS' employers, he says as much in his letter of 11 February. There can be no harm in letting him have the address, can there?'
Another passage from the letter purporting to be from Aramis says, 'April is get Heald month, May is get Vic, and June is get Sokol month'. This planned harassment programme was carried out. There is much more in the same vein.
The next big upset was about the article by Peter Goodman who, as editor, had suffered threats to himself and his invalid wife when he had refused publicity to unsubstantiated charges by SIGRIM writers against the International Committee. The blistering valedictory editorial he courageously wrote against them when he resigned exposed their methods but the SIGRIM faction seem to have managed to stop its publication in the American edition, something I found out only when researching this book.
I did my best to circulate news of the Di Cyan revelations but, although I had assembled a panel of candidates, I was very much isolated and very reluctant to risk more general publicity for the antics of a tiny untypical minority of loony fringe members. Goodman's exposure of SIGRIM appeared in January 1967, only in England.
With the bad publicity and faction fights on the American Committee there was a feeling among the increasing group of Canadian members that Mensa Canada should separate from North American Mensa. In June 1967 Mensa Canada was formed and recognised by the IGC, which was now meeting in its emaciated form every six weeks and doing most of its work by correspondence with its many overseas members. At this time we had 15,000 members worldwide and we had active operations in the UK, USA, Canada, France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, New Zealand, Australia, Malta, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Finland and India. We were planning operations in Greece and Israel and many other places but little could be done to help these developments because of the problems described. All these Mensa units had representation on the IGC on the basis of one vote per country regardless of membership.
We had no money to bring the committee together and I was trying to run all this from my small home study in the evenings and weekends. I communicated with my committee by post. My tools were a hand-held dictating machine, a telephone and a great deal of unjustified confidence and chutzpah. I worked with a series of part-rime secretaries working from their own homes from tapes I dictated. I sometimes reflect with utter astonishment on what can be done in the western world by a person or small group if they are cheeky enough, have an interesting new idea and are ready to learn the ropes. It will be seen that my troubles arose when others found that they could challenge me at the same game used destructively.
Low point though it was, 1967 was not entirely a bad year for Mensa. There was an excellent meeting of European Mensa pioneers in Lugano where the little harassed London group of Mensa internationalists were able to renew their sense of the real value of Mensa. In this beautiful old town we heard from Marianne Seydoux that French Mensa, after a period in the doldrums, was reviving rapidly after some good publicity, Swiss Mensa was prospering and so were Austrian and Dutch Mensa. All the British/ American troubles seemed not to have affected the Continent and I came away with a lifted heart. The best news of all about Lugano was the acceptance of what has been called the Third Aim of Mensa, which was later that year accepted by the whole society in a referendum.
For several days in the hurly burly of press attention and the scores of people who wanted to talk to me in Lugano, I had noticed a tiny little priest whose round not-too-well-shaven face was like that of a saintly cherub with its beaming goodwill. He made several attempts to engage me in conversation but my Italian is rudimentary and his English, at the time, was much the same. He failed to capture my attention in the competitive group that surrounded me most of the time. But eventually Don Calogera La Placa managed to attract, then hold, and then rivet my attention when we began to talk in French. He was one of the two or three members we had in Sicily and, as it turned out, one of those many folk around the world with whom I was corresponding. What he had done was remarkable and admirable. He was a priest in a rigidly traditional inward-looking, almost medieval culture in a small unprosperous mountain town in Sicily. He had decided that what was needed in order to bring his poor island into the prosperity of the modem world was a move to locate and educate bright underprivileged children, to build up the cadre of trained talent that was essential to a modem society. Educated within the stifling bigotry of the local culture, he had sufficiently emancipated himself by a painstaking reading which included my own books.
He conceived the idea of a school for underprivileged able children in Sicily which he later managed to found. Further he persuaded me that Mensa should take upon itself the aim of fostering giftedness (rather than just collecting it) for the general benefit of humanity.
Don Calogera is a natural orator, one of the most effective I have heard. He was so effective that an understanding of the language he spoke did not seem to be essential. I gave him a spot at the IGC meeting in Lugano and he managed by the sheer power of personal magnetism and charisma, with only a hesitant translation of his words by a local linguist, to persuade the meeting to accept his proposed amendment to our constitution. This became the Third Aim when it was accepted by a referendum.
At the American AG in June a 'no confidence' motion against the IGC was rejected.
At this point I must explain the split in the pioneers which contributed to the problems. There had been set up a small group of six to go into the objections of the small British group who opposed the new International Constitution which had been devised by Eric Hills and accepted by an overwhelming vote. It had been skilfully devised to enshrine and preserve the practices which had enabled us to develop until then. It was a clever document which was loose enough to be practical yet did not give too much scope to what are called 'barrack room lawyers' in England. It ensured democracy and an underlying sound practice.
It lasted until 1980. Eric Hills himself, Brian Locke and a few others, were on the 1966 commission and when they produced their draft it was at odds with what I myself and the rest of the IGC majority thought was essential to preserve the international unity of Mensa. It reduced the role, importance and finances of the International Committee and delegated most functions to the National Committees leaving the IGC with only a loose coordinating role. It was against everything I had been working for and frankly I did not like it at all. It upset my friend and colleague, Eric Hills, when I raised objections and we decided to put our different views to the membership. His was the really influential voice against me at the dreadful London meeting I have described. The majority of the International Committee supported my view and in the subsequent referendum after arguments in the International Journal it prevailed so that it was Eric Hills' first Constitution rather than his group's second version which took us through the next seventeen years when it was replaced by the one now in force.
The arguments over 'Motion Two' which would have accepted the new idea, took up a lot of time and attention during that year. There was a big problem and scandal over the International Committee Election.
An already very fraught, confused situation was made worse by a last minute telegram from the American Committee which by now had turned against the International Committee but represented the large majority of members. They demanded a delay in the date for the submission of nominations. My committee thought it wise to grant this unusual request and we appointed the British Electoral Reform Society to conduct the election and count the votes, because we had every reason to be confident that anything we did would be likely to be challenged by SIGRIM.
On the nomination day Athos arrived at the very last minute with his SIGRIM nomination and there was a third beside the Wilson/ Serebriakoff nomination which I had managed to assemble.
The ballots were sent out, not easy to arrange in Mensa, now world wide, and the votes came in to the Electoral Reform Society. But SIGRIM were on the offensive in an undifferentiated way and now the Director of the Electoral Reform Society began to come under fire from the SIGRIM faction. SIGRIM evidently felt that insulting strictures, warnings and threats to the Electoral Reform Society were essential to ensure that they had any chance. These had a counter-productive effect. The poor Director, Frank Brittan, though a tough political veteran who often worked for the fractious factions of the British Trade Union Movement, said he had never known the like. He was so disturbed and upset that he went off sick and this delayed the count There was a long, tense, stressful delay with all parties in the Mensa world screaming at me.l put all the pressure I could on the society but time went on and the letters and telegrams from the SIGRIM group became frantic as they sensed victory and felt, not altogether unreasonably, that they were being gerrymandered. Frank Brittan was extremely scathing to the press about the phone calls and letters he had received from the tiny group of Mensa loonies, and of course poor old Mensa had to take a lot more stick from the delighted media. Athos rushed eagerly in to cause another scandal which led to the piece in the Sunday Times of which I have told.
As I have explained the SIGRIM panel had not dared to feature any of their own, by now notorious, names on the nominations, so Athos had got together a large group of members, many from his own town, and the panel put forward consisted of perfectly respectable people, many of whom had little or no idea of the inside story about the SIGRIM group who were sponsoring them. Some of them have proved to be Mensa stalwarts since. This was the Mayne/Frisch panel and they won the election with 2,212 votes. The Wilson/Serebriakoff panel got 1,660, while the third 'Reconsideration' slate got 876 votes. I had not expected this defeat and was deeply downcast. I was extremely (and it turned out wrongly) worried about what would happen to Mensa with SIGRIM nominees in charge. What monster, I asked myself, had I created? I felt like the sorcerer's apprentice. My monster proved to be an inactive mouse.
The election result which was announced in March 1968 marked the end of the low point in Mensa development.
Having won their famous victory SIGRIM vanished like a puff of smoke. There were no more scandal sheets, press scandals, meetings, protests or threats from that source. Nothing!
The Musketeers and the individual members were to remain and engage in even fiercer battles with each other, with National Mensa Committees and officers. There were to be new internal scandals and problems with and between its members but the organisation SIGRIM died on the spot in the moment of its triumph.
Athos became the Editor of the International Journal for a time. By November that year there was severe criticism of his editorship at the British AG. His first issue gave a flattering profile of Porthos and we saw some well posed pictures of himself at his best. But the troubles were over at least in the UK. Nothing constructive was happening but no actual harm was being done at the international level, except much wasteful spending.
Having reached a nadir Mensa began the slow healing process and thus proved its real viability and the fact that there was a pool of loyalty among our members despite the absurd public antics of Mensa's inevitable, but minuscule, intelligent, able and zealous loony fringe.
The International Committee obtains its funds by drawing a proportion of the subscription of every member. In spite of Athos's canards a fair reserve had been built up in its coffers. The new Committee began to deplete these by meeting alternately in London and New York and, for the first time, there was a good deal of transatlantic travel chargeable to Mensa for attendance. I was asked to hold the proxy vote of two continental Mensas and amazed and embarrassed the new IGC by turning up at the London meetings. The newly elected panel, many of whom had no committee experience in Mensa, had got their ideas of me from those who had nominated them. The brazen presence of this arch villain, as I had been depicted, was an unexpected shock to some of the quite genuine people who were having to cope with a set of unfamiliar problems.
I enjoyed my new role in a perverse way. I had all the facts and precedents at my fingertips and I was extremely unpopular as I attacked impractical ideas and made suggestions that they would have liked to, but dared not, oppose. I had the time of my life with Athos because, unlike him, I was quite happy to make uninhibited, face-to-face attacks. I was now doing the harassing and he was trying to do the constructive defending. I flatter myself that I was better at the role switch than he.
At the first couple of meetings his new colleagues defended him and tried to controvert my detailed attacks, but later they heard me with embarrassed silence. Eventually they began to placate me and ask me to help. Within a few meetings I, who had been castigated for embezzlement and profligacy, was asked to take on the sensitive role of Publicity Officer for Mensa International. I soon found myself more influential with a committee that had beaten mine in the election than I had been with my own team.
The underlying secret in Mensa, as perhaps in all voluntary organisations, is that while politicians, place-seekers and outcries come and go, it is always the beavers which run the show. Anyone with patience and persistence and a willingness to take responsibility and work systematically will have no difficulty in rising in the hierarchy to the level at which their time and patience lasts.
The next few years were calm after the storm in Mensa; no motion or progress of any kind whatever.
British Mensa subsided slowly from the peak of about 3,500. American Mensa remained fairly static during a period when Sander Rubin, as the new American Chairman, did his best to repair the ravages of the SIGRIM episode and deal with the rump of the faction who had penetrated the Committee and were now causing other troubles. He did a fair job at a difficult time.
At the AG in Tarrytown there were 225 members. American membership halted the previous year's downward drift and held at about 11,000.
In 1969 it was clear that the British were disenchanted with Athos and his idiosyncratic work as editor, and the American Committee were being accused by his faction of censoring the International Journal he edited.
Karl Ross, a Mensa stalwart who edited the American Mensa Bulletin for many years, appeared as assistant editor that year. In Britain a young student just down from the Machine Intelligence Unit at Edinburgh University became the British Mensa Secretary. Dr Nigel Searle became Assistant International General Secretary later. Sir Clive Sinclair was then a thin young red-bearded journalist whom I met as member and with whom I was much impressed because of his lightning wit and penetratingly swift mental grasp. I tried to talk the youth out of his enthusiasm for the transistor as a substitute for the well developed thermionic valve but he swept my sensible arguments aside and I must admit has managed to make the things work somehow. Today his company, Sinclair Research Limited, has sold more computers than any other in the world. Nigel met Clive through Young Mensa contacts and today he runs Sinclair Research while Clive plans innovative industrial triumphs.
Clive has been British Mensa Chairman for five years, during which we have gained about 11,000 members. Clive has said that his take-off and later success as a world-famous innovative industrial pioneer was much aided by many Mensa contacts when he was a young unknown.
Mensa has only this answer to those who repeatedly ask, 'But what do you do with all those brains? What of general benefit do you achieve?' Our answer is that brains do not work en masse but in teams. Mensa has helped its members to build countless fine and effective teams but its apologists and chroniclers do not even know about most of them and certainly would not claim credit for them. But instead we have to bear blame and.discredit for the frenzied loonies from those who love to laugh at what they erroneously see as our pretentiousness. Seventy thousand people cannot be made into a team, army or pressure group. But Mensa can be and is the substrate upon which excellent competitive teams grow and thrive.
In December that year I revived a special kind of lecture discussion which has been growing even more popular as a Mensa event. A distinguished speaker makes a speech on some speculative or controversial topic and this is followed by an hour and a half of discussion to which everyone is encouraged to contribute. The best of these are marvellous with lots of wit and clever joking, as well as serious, thoughtful talk. Even the worst are not bad. Mensa produces good talk.
It was in June 1969 that a British member, Peter Devenish, won a competition for the design of the Mensa Logo. This insignia has been accepted as the Mensa sign and replaced Berrill's Ku Klux Klan figures. For those who are unable to comprehend some of
the increasingly divergent variants, the original idea was a representation of the world on a table where the top and legs are shown so that they form the 'M' of Mensa. I am prepared to concede that it is an improvement on Berrill's idea.
Peter's design can now be seen everywhere, on badges, stickers, pins, car stickers, beer mats, matches, pens, flags, tee-shins and tattoos!
One stunt during Athos's brief reign as International Editor was his attempt to rewrite Mensa history.
Dr L. L. Ware, Berrill's friend who had dropped out of Mensa seventeen years before, was approached by Athos and, as a result, there was a motion of the IGC in New York that Dr Ware should be recognised as the true founder, on the basis of his telling Athos that he had suggested the idea to Berrill. Athos was about to publish an article claiming that Dr Ware, not Berrill, was the founder. Word got out and some of the early members approached me with profound objections to what they saw as a failure to give credit to Berrill's major contribution. ! was asked to see Dr Ware and he told me that he had made no claim to be the sole founder as Athos had said. He would give his account in an article which was eventually published. The headline was altered and Ware was featured as one of the founding pair. Soon afterwards there was a dinner party at which he was installed as a Honorary Vice President, in recognition of his initial contribution.
In July 1969 Eric Hills was honoured by being appointed to a new role, that of International Ombudsman which in Mensa is rather like being Lord Chief Justice. He has served in that difficult role with exemplary perseverance, patience and trust ever since. Here is another real Mensa stalwart. His courage and fairness made him the only man who ever ever induced the worst of Mensa-damaging loonies actually to apologise. It was Eric Hills who was given the dreadful and dangerous task of judging Porthos when, true to his nature if to nothing else, his continued mischief brought him into conflict with those whom his activities had brought to power.
Despite the bad tidings that were happening at this time there were some excellent developments, not much noticed at the time, which were to be of major importance much later. There was a new generation of Mensans who had joined in early youth. They got together in Young Mensa at a period when, in my opinion, it was more active and effective than the British Committee. The circle included many who are now famous in the computer world particularly. Some of this group are the really motivated driving force of Mensa in Britain today.
In late 1969 the by now much criticised Athos gave up as editor and handed over to George and Rosemary Athenon. Dr Athenon proved to be another Mensa stalwart at the international level. He was a tower of calm strength over many hard years during which he carried the torch of the International Journal with efficiency and credit. Looking back he was one of the best editors.
By 1970 the new International Committee, which was characterised by an unwise and unmasterly inactivity, was breaking up.
Nominations were called for the new International election and I made up my mind to stand again. I agreed with Bob Van Den Bosch that we would put up a joint slate called, 'The Unity Slate' which would try to heal Mensa's wounds.
During this period Porthos had turned back to America in his eager quest for attention and persecution. He protested in all possible ways on all possible occasions to all possible persons and committees. He eventually appealed in long rambling detailed letters to the International Ombudsman for justice, with the usual threats as to what would happen if he did not get it. Hills' published judgement was a round, complete and unreserved condemnation of Porthos himself and all his works. Porthos was ordered to apologise to those he had traduced and his membership was suspended for one year. To everyone's astonishment Porthos meekly complied. But it was not the last of Porthos: he continued his activities on much the same tines later in America and much later, after much heart searching, had to be expelled from Mensa by the American Committee.
Athos, who was not prosperous, eventually lapsed when well-wishers stopped paying his subscription. There is an option in Mensa by which those who cannot afford the subscriptions can be let off if they write and ask. He did not take this option, and for some reason no one urged him to do so. Later we heard newspaper stories of other scandals he was involved with in his own town and then he was quiet for several years before he died after a long illness some years ago. Aramis disappeared and has not been heard of for a long time.
That was how Mensa coped with its own special kind of problem in those formative days. We cope rather better these days. Because they are always changing leadership, collectivities like Mensa learn slowly, but in the end they learn. The malicious disrupter problem is an interesting and recurring one and it seems to arise from the fact that, as Professor Terman discovered in the great survey of which I shall write, most intelligent people are reasonable, polite, constructive and above average in accepted social behaviour. When they encounter inexplicable and motiveless mischief and malice in other people like themselves, they are slow to believe it or to accept that it may have no reasonable or logical cause. Time after time 'peace makers' come forward saying that if only the destructive few could be treated with better tact and understanding they could be brought to see reason and behave more normally. Time after time, challenged to try this, they have come surprisedly unstuck.
I believe that what motivates malice in bright humans is often under-achievers' envy. When you can out-think those who do better, you are more bitter and spiteful than when you cannot. Intelligence helps towards, but does not ensure, success. Many other qualities are required and lack of them is the bitter problem. In other cases there is the built-in failure trend in some of the very bright. Perhaps it is an introjection of early peer-group envy/hatted which poisons effort and reinforces under-achievement.
In October my book How Intelligent Are You? was published. It was a layman's popular account of IQ testing and it contained roughly standardised tests such as intelligence tests. I arranged for a feature in the Daily Mirror, and this proved to be another breakthrough which started a new very successful recruiting method that was to be developed into an important recruitment aid. The Daily Mirror is a popular tabloid newspaper and it has a very large circulation. For Mensa I had always, until then, aimed for publicity in the more serious newspapers like The Times.
This was an experiment with an admitted spin-off advantage to me as an author. I spent several nights at the Daily Mirror offices with the Features Editor and they ran a competition every day for a week with IQ type questions from my book. My aim was to make Mensa more representative and I wanted to reach the people like myself from underprivileged backgrounds who might be unaware of how bright they were. My title that attracted the Mirror editor was, 'ARE YOU A SECRET SUPERBRAIN?'
The deal was that British Mensa should have the reply coupons and a chance to use them for recruitment. At the end of the week the newspaper handed me eight mail bags with forty-seven thousand replies. There was near panic in our little office. A timely initiative by a Young Mensan started a major exercise in a clubroom over a London pub as he organised volunteers from Young Mensa.
Despite this spontaneous help the British Mensa office then was not able to cope with such a rush and the subsequent gain of members in the UK was not all that it should have been. But big gains were made, the downward trend was checked for a time and an important lesson was learned.
My 1970 Superbrain scheme was the model for much later development effort. It was repeated in numerous variations in British Mensa and still continues.
The greatest single explanation of British Mensa's recent very rapid growth has been the development and perfection of this and similar techniques. Other Mensas including American Mensa developed similar techniques and they were often very successful indeed. Apparently there are potential Mensans among the readers of all types of newspapers and they love to send in answers to published quizzes. What matters, it emerges, is more the circulation than the intellectual image of the journal.
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I asked National Mensa Chairmen to let me have the local Mensa History and one of the few replies came from Ruth Whittle of Australian Mensa. She and her husband have been the staunchest Mensans and since they became active in 1964 they have never faltered in their work and support.
At that time the world membership was 3,600, mostly in Britain. There were about 20 Australian members, some recruited from London and some who had emigrated from the UK.
Dr Tom Sandemen and Jeff Whittle met to discuss Mensa and, like the French founder Marianne Seydoux, firmly decided that nothing could or should be done about an Australian national branch. However a British member, Marjorie Meakins, had met me and asked me to speak to the girls at the private girls' school in Hertfordshire where she was headmistress. When she told me of her plan to emigrate I arranged with the Committee that she should be given an enormous grant and full instructions and authority to set up the Australian Branch. So, with twenty-five good British pound notes, she set out to establish the Mensa flag in the Antipodes. I told her to send back any surplus cash after she had succeeded but Australian Mensa has retained the whole of this great sum ever since. When American Mensa borrowed a thousand pounds when I went there, they returned it within a year.
Marjorie arrived in Melbourne with her three teenage children. She contacted the Whittles and Sandemen. Then, learning from the London successes a few years before, she soon got a spot on the TV programme, 'People '64'.
Following favourable exposure Marjorie, who could claim to be the founder of Australian Mensa, began advertising and recruiting members adapting the methods I had tried to explain in London. Most of the early members were expatriates but soon there were some 'real Australians'.
Activities began in the usual way with meetings in private houses that seem, according to Ruth, to have been after the think-in format, especially when they ran out of Mensan speakers and began to invite outside talent.
Marjorie ran things for about a year but the Australian Mensa problem is a difficult one because of the wide dispersal of a small population. The separate States had to set up their own systems and there was a long succession of changing incumbents each of whom carried the Mensa torch through a year or two in the pattern I have described. They have not yet reached the take-off point when a professional staff can be engaged.
For many years the unifying element in a large continent has been the Australian Mensa journal TABLEAUS (TABLE/AUStralia). It has always been lively and readable. Over the years until 1984 they have attracted 20,000 enquiries and enrolled 2,200 members of which they retain about 700 today. Mensa has a membership turnover problem everywhere because one motivation for application is that of getting an economical IQ test So there are some who drop out after one year. This applies especially in Australia where many new members are isolated from other members and cannot get the benefit of meeting our network.
Sydney Jackson is a world expert on parachutes. He has to make frequent business trips to Australia and he was a vital personal link between the IGC and the Australian membership. He was particularly helpful when Australian Mensa was having its own version of the sort of troubles described above. A sincere and obsessively persistent member of the litigious men of straw type repeatedly found faults in the polling procedures (always easy to do in view of the problems described). He managed to persuade Mensa's bank to freeze all funds pending the outcome of some obscure proposed litigation. Between 1970 and 1973 Australian Mensa was at a standstill. I got many long emotional letters from the complainer of which I could make little sense. It was Sydney Jackson, who, on one of his business trips, made a stop at the remote town and managed, in a face-to-face talk, to resolve the matter.
Another responsive National Chairman was Udo Schultz, the present chairman of German Mensa.
My first attempts in Germany had been with the help of a popular author, Baron Soltikow. These came to nothing and the real German Mensa beginning was, as I said, when my friend Georg Fishhof introduced Dr Steiner. Steiner was a psychologist. He was extremely active and efficient during the short period he remained interested. Mensa in Germany did well until he gave up a year or two later. There was then a troubled and unprogressive period under less active and less effective chairmen and committees. At one point there was a story of a financial mess which the IGC decided it must clear up for the good of the Mensa name. We were advised by the local members who remained loyal, to disband the German branch and set them up as international members. In fact the financial problems were easily sorted out by this new active group with the help of a British resident, Julian Parr, and no IGC support was needed. Since then there have been increasingly successful efforts towards a fresh start which were helped by an international meeting, with well known names such as Clive Sinclair, in Cologne. Another large and well publicised meeting this year just over the border at Kerkrade, Holland, may prove to have helped.
The new start was in 1981 and by the end of that year we had 72 paid-up German members and recruiting was going on effectively again.
Udo thinks that a psychological difficulty in the modem German climate is a suspicion of anything which smacks of the utterly disavowed 'herrenvolk' notion which the uncharitable, mistakenly, think they see in mental tests and Mensa.
It is not that German Mensa has had no publicity. There has been plenty but until recently it has been negative. But Mensa is news whether the media like it or not and the journalist cannot go on telling the same old story. If only to introduce novelty someone will, in the end, try another tack.
Quoting Udo, 'Painfully slowly members who were lucky enough to know newspaper people personally, managed to get fair reports into the press ... After a few articles had successfully been launched things looked somewhat brighter ... Right from the start close bonds existed between Mensa in Southern Germany and Mensa Austria, followed by frequent contacts and co-operation with Mensa in Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. By the end of March 1984 membership had risen to 149, which means an increase of nearly fifty percent in one year.'
Greatly increased and more favourable recent publicity has made the German picture brighter and I hope to see in the next few years the true continental take-off we have never seemed to get before, from a base in Germanophone Europe.
Another chairman's story comes in from Philip Poole who for years has chaired the National Mensa which holds the world's Mensa penetration record. It is Channel Islands Mensa. Penetration is the Mensans per million of local population. Channel Islands has 130,000 people and they have 150 Mensans. That is 1,154 per million against the UK (second) with 205 and USA (third) with 178 per million. The Channel Islands are not, as many think, a part of the United Kingdom, and during a period of problems in British Mensa they chose to break away and were recognised by the IGC as a separate national Mensa.
It all started when Philip Anley, an estate agent in Jersey, joined and later became the CI Locsec. When he left and handed over to Philip Poole there were eight members. Philip was one of the enthusiasts we need everywhere but do not always find. He pitched in with successful publicity stunts and Superbrain competitions such as I have described and by 1972 had got the membership up to 70 so that there was quite a lot of Mensa activity on the group of islands. British Mensa had got into difficulties and raised the subscriptions at the same time as they reduced the publication which was all that the islands got from British Mensa. To publish a better magazine and continue activity Philip led a breakaway which was not resisted. With Philip's irrepressible enthusiasm and drive CI Mensa continued to grow on these small scattered Islands faster, relatively, than anywhere else. CI Mensa was strong enough by 1978 to host one of the best Mensa International Congresses I remember, with representation from about twenty countries. Philip was very active on the IGC also as a National Representative until the recent constitutional changes deprived International Mensa of his Mensa promoting talents.
These are just a few typical samples of the various National Mensa beginnings.
There were so many false starts in other countries that I could not record them. I was involved in it in my spare time for most of thirty years and most of the hundreds of abortive and mistaken efforts have gone from my mind.
I would get a letter or a call from a sole member in a far off country, for example Bolivia. I would give or send exemplary documentation and instructions and tell the enthusiast how to contact psychologists and get publicity. The IGC would make a small seed money grant if the case seemed promising and we would give all the support we could in view of distance and communications difficulties. Sometimes these seeds would germinate and a new Mensa would grow, sometimes we would get a small beginning which would fade after a year or two, more often we would hear little more. But sometimes, the seed germinates and the needed enthusiasts come forward to nurture it. If they manage to set up such a system whereby they are successively replaced when, inevitably, they tire of routine chores, then we add one more to the gradually growing list of National Mensas around the world. If that Mensa gets big enough to risk setting up a professional staff then, if it works out, we get a new large, stable, permanent Mensa.
The work of Mensa-building is challenging and interesting at first but once the effective methods for a region are worked out it becomes a matter of mechanical persistence in routine chores and that is no longer fun for the unpaid Mensan enthusiast. It is only when that less challenging part of the work is professionalised that Mensa really thrives.
lndian Mensa was started and sustained by a Calcutta student, Amitananda Das, but when he became too occupied with his studies the centre was transferred to a Bombay group connected with Dnyna Prabodhinee, a wonderful multi-caste school for gifted children founded and run by Dr V. V. Pendse. lndian Mensa was also chaired by a wealthy benevolent industrialist who helped the school, Mr P. V. Schroff. An lndian who lives in Germany, Sushil Bilaney has also been very helpful.
Recently, lndian Mensa was disclaimed by the new IBD because it has been unable to meet the minimum standards that the International Board insist upon. The Mensa problem in the poorer countries is that there are so few enthusiasts with the time, and there is so little cash available for testing, subscriptions and postal communications which are slow and difficult. We have to find ways of making Mensa into less of a luxury product for the richer countries before we can be satisfied.
Finnish Mensa has developed steadily since the late sixties and I have helped with visits and publicity because my past work as Managing Director of an innovative wood technology company took me frequently to all the Scandinavian countries.
Scandinavian Mensa, which includes Norway and Sweden, also started after numerous attempts when I found a very effective Norwegian Mensa enthusiast in the late Henrik Sellaeg. Henrik was an Oslo banker member who I contacted on a business trip. Henrik was a hard and effective worker and he beat the tough problems of developing Mensa in a small country with a scattered population.
As in Sweden the problem is the tendency for the press to deride and attack anything that can be labelled elitist. Although the Scandinavian countries have excellent traditions for finding, teaming up and using the talents of their ablest people, they have recently been affected by egalitarian, centralist, socialist ethos. Mensa has an uphill struggle in such countries until our real protean nature, our all-class origin and neutral political stance is perceived. Henrik's initiative was cleverly designed and successful and Norwegian Mensa became the recruiting base and merged with the smaller group in Sweden.
A very early Swedish Mensa set going by the expatriate American Jay Albrecht in the late fifties had disappeared completely and many personal efforts during business trips had proved abortive. Today things are going well and I expect Scandinavian Mensa to grow and thrive as Finnish Mensa has done.
Many attempts to form Mensa groups on the South American continent have failed or survived only briefly. We still await the pioneer there who can solve the local problems. Possibly Spanish American members can help American Mensa to find a way to sow the seed in better soil there. There are quite a large number of isolated members scattered around that continent.
[In] The Far East there are large thriving groups in such world culture centres as Singapore and Hong Kong. All these have been going very well recently. Japan has a few hundred members but there was a severe communication problem as soon as the membership grew beyond the expatriate western group. This seems to be the inevitable starting point for countries and cultures with non-European languages.
Swiss Mensa was started by a multilingual Swiss, Alan Henderson, and nurtured by the mental arithmetic wizard and linguist, Dr Hans Eberstark, but it has never really developed strongly. It seems to remain stable with a membership a little below one hundred.
Israeli Mensa was set up after endless correspondence with London and holiday visits by myself and several other London Mensa workers at various times. It has a definite but precarious existence and awaits the real enthusiast who is also a communicator of enthusiasm who will one day galvanise it.
New Zealand Mensa is one of those Mensas with a really effective and innovative central group. For some years past it has held an honoured high place in the Mensa penetration stakes. Barbara Thompson, their latest chairman, is a professional airline pilot and an innovative organiser as well. Her mobility must be very useful in the work for Mensa that she is doing so well.
Holland and Belgium are two countries in which we have had the same serious problem of division. Perhaps the surprising thing is that we have not had the problem elsewhere. We have never had the finance for the enormous expense of protecting the Mensa name everywhere on earth. In both these countries the founder, having started with Mensa finance and support a genuine Mensa branch, got in first with a registration of the name on their own behalf. Without consent from the international body they both set up and registered with the national authorities organisations called 'Mensa' which were constitutionally under their personal, life-long control. This pre-empted the registration by the International Society of its democratic constitution and made it possible for these breakaway groups to prevent us using the name 'Mensa' in the two countries.
In both cases the unofficial undemocratic constitution was rejected by the IGC and that caused a split, with some members staying with the national founder and others setting up a new official and recognised branch. Mensa's apparent dual existence continued in both countries with each faction hampering and inhibiting the growth of the other and causing unhappy publicity. Attempts at legal action organised by Vice President Dr Ware in the seventies to prevent this 'passing off', were costly and ineffectual and we had to live with the split-personality Mensas for many years.
In the long run united International Mensa prevailed in both cases. In Holland there was a great celebration a year or two ago when, after some correspondence between the factions which I was able to initiate, they reunited leaving the original founder, the now ageing Commander Naber, with just a tiny rump of his old friends in the unofficial branch.
In Belgium, I understand, the breakaway Mensa has faded and almost disappeared while the official branch, led by a dynamic young man, Bernard Senault, is prospering.
Behind the Iron Curtain we have had a series of false dawns. Hearing of Mensa, a stream of people, mostly academics, write in and join under the special arrangements for countries where we have no possibility of supervised testing. They get a provisional membership. They write enthusiastically and some of them suggest setting up a branch. They often seem to be unaware that there might be official objections. We always warn them and they often contradict us. Then after a time, short or long, the chink in the iron curtain seems to clang shut and everything goes very quiet. We hear no more from that quarter and our letters remain unanswered.
A beautiful Polish woman became a member at one time. We were established in Poland. But it did not last. Dr Alan Henderson, at that time an International Development Officer, telegraphed to me with this mixed news.
'VICTOR STOP HAVE ABOLISHED POLISH MENSA BY MARRYING HER STOP'.
So Polish Mensa went to live with Alan in Basel but all too soon, sadly, the Polish Mensa divorced the disconsolate Alan. Learning the lesson, Mensa has discouraged marriages between National Branches and individuals since then.
Mensa always has a few 'Ostbloc' members but never many, never for very long. I yearn to see more informed and intelligent interchange across this dangerous ideological and philosophical divide and hope one day to welcome many members from the Marxist-ruled parts of the world. So long as we remain uncommitted and impartial this could not be bad but if it were otherwise there would be no sense and much danger in it. I would hate to see a Mensa dominated by any ideology or faction.
Italy is a country where Mensa has had several promising starts which have faded. The first I started myself on a holiday visit in 1966. I had found and inspired an enthusiastic and effective Italian American called Victor Viglino. After correspondence I arranged my holiday trip so as to meet him in Naples where he was an executive in a large American conglomerate.
The publicity was positive and plentiful. Victor did a very good job for Mensa then and for the duration of his enthusiasm. However he horrified the IGC by an error which proved to be damaging. Very much a self-starter entrepreneur he failed to realise that an IQ test published is an IQ test destroyed and, without a word to Mensa or the copyright owners, he 'gave permission' to a big magazine to publish an Italian translation of an IQ test we use. This so enraged the entire psychological profession in Italy (which at that time was minuscule) that, despite many attempts during business trips, it was many years before I persuaded the local doyen of the profession to forgive us and co-operate.
Dr Abbele of Milan was the psychologist concerned and when we did make friends at last he gave me a very fine contribution to Mensa thinking which I have repeated endlessly. 'It can only be', he said, 'the intelligent in each language and cultural group, who can comprehend each other across the semantic chasms that divide them.' It was more or less the same thought that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth gave me later when I was introduced. Even the British Queen, you see, suffers from the same precognitive plagiarism that has always dogged me. People, especially Mensans, read my thoughts before I have them. It is a most disrespectful way to treat the Queen and even this humble Mensa President.
The second Italian beginning arose out of the faded rump of the first. It was centred on Como and fostered by Alan Henderson who was then living in Lugano. That effort faded away too and there was little heard of Mensa in Italy for a year or two until the appearance of the needed enthusiast in the form of the good Dr Mennoti Cossu from Rome whom I first met in a big Mensa Congress in Graz.
Mennoti Cossu is a man of enormous drive and enthusiasm who makes things happen effectively despite being confined by an early illness to a wheelchair. His work, with the constant help of his devoted wife and of the team he has built up, is effective and he taps the vein of applications that is opened up by successful and favourable publicity. I myself was able to visit last year and we got TV and good magazine coverage.
I am certain that, at last, Italian Mensa is established as a permanent part of Mensa. It is part of the very difficult and so far rather insecure, breakout from Anglophonia (if you will permit my neologism for the English speaking world) where we have had our greatest appeal and strength so far.
Spain has had a similar patchy Mensa history with number of half-hearted starts which have been inhibited by the difficulties with the authorities there. Recently the omens have been suddenly better. Once we can establish Mensa firmly there I believe that folk in the southern half of the American continent will begin to want to join our world-spanning comprehending community.
Irish Mensa is still part of British Mensa but despite the border problems it embraces both parts of the island. There is no border in Irish Mensa. It is autonomous in everything except that it sensibly uses the facilities of the well-organised British office rather than undertake, at this early stage, the risky experiment of setting its own selection agency.
The relations between Mensa in Britain and in Ireland could hardly be better and some of the most enjoyable weekends for Britons have been in Belfast and Dublin alternately.
British Mensa's favourite Irishman, David Lalley the international and British archivist has played a great part in the development of Irish Mensa and of the good relations that exist. He is a good-looking young man who is one of the most ardent and least political of Mensa stalwarts. His collection of Mensa memorabilia (mementos) is unequalled and he displays them at all important meetings for new members to see.
Another Mensa enthusiast who has done much for the development of Irish Mensa recently has been their Chairman, David Schulman, a Dubliner who is now also the International Administrations Officer. Irish Mensa has grown fast since he began to be active and I believe we shall hear more of his contribution at the international level.
Africa has been a problem for Mensa with too many false starts and little solid progress until the mid-seventies. We have had a cell in what was then Rhodesia which was mistakenly recognized in the very early, over-enthusiastic days. Kenya made a fairly promising beginning after my business trips there but that faded too during the periods of political tension when attention was distracted.
During the dynamic period of Robert Lehr's presidency of French Mensa he made good contacts in Senegal and the Ivory Coast during business trips. We still have loyal groups of francophone local members in each capital. Nor are these expatriates. Both groups were prematurely recognised and have since had, sadly, to be derecognised as National Mensas because they have not been able to solve the very difficult recruitment problems in such countries and have remained too small.
The one striking success was in South Africa where Mensa has become strong and widespread but it is not yet fully recognised. My first approach in the sixties was discouraged by the government of the time with a stern note from the Ministry which informed me that South Africa had enough cultural associations and needed no more.
During the seventies I had to go there to introduce my electronic stress-grading machine for automatic quality control which was useful for their fast-grown cultivated conifers. During my trips I promoted Mensa as usual. I expected difficulties because Mensa cannot accept any other barrier to membership than the one we have all accepted. (Green members with yellow stripes will be welcomed warmly if they qualify.)
I was told before I got there that it would be impossible for members to meet in a mixed-race Mensa but I found, to my surprise, that the press published my statement of Mensa principles and no one seemed to object to Mensa's anti-racialist position.
There had been from the very earliest days a loyal handful of immigrant expatriate members but of course they were almost all of European origin. They helped with and welcomed the publicity from my visit. It galvanised the local group and they began to work towards national status as they recruited more members locally. I was able to reassure the International Committee that at least a few members were of Asian and African origin. In later trips I was able to meet these members myself in meetings in Cape Town and other places, so I can confidently say that South African Mensa does not practice apartheid. Further all my conversations with members of all racial backgrounds showed that in South Africa, among Mensans, there is no apparent support for apartheid. I do not claim however that Mensa has as many members in all the local race groups as I (and the local members) would like to see. Here is a problem in many places which will not be solved easily.
A bigger breakthrough came when Christine Chester emigrated and soon became the local chairman. She built up membership to some hundreds quite quickly and thus strong groups were formed in the main centres which took up the work and continue to thrive today.
Christine is a graduate linguist. She joined Mensa and was later, briefly, my extraordinarily competent persona! business secretary. But later still, my friend and business associate, South African Solly Tucker, came to England, met her at a trade show I was in, and took her back as his own PA to Pretoria.
That is how we got a fresh surge of Mensa growth in South African Mensa. It now has a large and thriving branch which seems stable and viable. I know there are some who regret that we have members there but I stick to my view that we should recruit sapient humanity without any exceptions of our own making. Mensans have no collective views but I am sure the overwhelming majority of them condemn apartheid. Constitutionally we may not practise it ourselves by excluding those who can qualify, no matter where they are found.
There is a conclusion to this world Mensa tour. It demonstrates how, by a chapter of seeming accidents, we have spread abroad from our starting point in Oxford. Unplanned, opportunistic and sporadic is what it has been. For that, those who have done the work have often been criticised.
There have been vociferous demands, especially from hopeful election candidates, for systematic, budgeted, planned campaigns and the like. There have even been attempts to make such plans and carry them through. But, so far, it seems Mensa is simply not that kind of animal. Mensa has been like the wind which bloweth where it listeth and may not be commanded.
I am sure that the highly developed recruitment systems that we have in a few countries could be adapted and transported, predictably and reliably, across language and culture barriers, but it would require an amount of risk capital that we have not persuaded members to provide.
Until we provide it, or try other methods, we are very reasonably dependent on what may be called the serendipity factor which I and some others seem to have made to work after a style. We are in the business of helping members in new national reports where the entrepreneurial enthusiast makes his unheralded appearance as an expression of Mensa's will to be in that land. Then, opportunistic and erratic, we move in. When the local effort flags we do not grieve. We tum to aid the next enthusiast. There are always plenty.
I believe that with 67,000 members Mensa is still in its infancy and I firmly join with that other rather more important president, Mr Ronald Reagan, in saying about World Mensa, 'Y' ain't seen nuthin' yet'.
What will ensure the real breakout from Anglophonia that will come will, I believe, be the professionalisation of a franchising system. The recruitment function should be performed by small, reasonably profitable, professional organisations who would specialise in the recruitment function, being paid by results. They would be strictly supervised and would hand over to Mensa nothing but a stream of members.
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In October 1971 it was announced in the International Journal that my Unity Slate had been returned unopposed as the International General Committee. I was elected as International Chairman and Bob Van Den Bosch, who was an officer in the Dutch Army, became the International General Secretary. Herman Blumenthal was Treasurer and there was a Dutch member, Adrian Visser, a British solicitor, Raymond Allen, the Swiss, Henderson, and an American, Dr Max Fogel who has been a great contributor to Mensa since the first in America.
In[sic] amendment to the American Mensa bylaws were passed at the June AGM.
During 1971 Mensa celebrated its Silver Jubilee with a reception which was held in Lincoln's Inn where many of the Mensa old timers met each other again. Soon afterwards Dr Ware arranged for the installation of the blue plaque of which I have spoken on the wall of the house in Oxford from which Berrill had set out with the copy for the printer in 1946.
Looking back now, 1971 can be seen as another of Mensa's new beginnings as well as the year of its Silver Anniversary. The political storms and public scandals had died down a little although there was still dissension on the American Committee. But good things began to happen. In France another of the short dynamic men who often seem to be Mensa promoters, Monsieur Robert Lehr, began to galvanise French Mensa and soon became its Chairman.
What Lehr showed conclusively is that the Mensa dream can be exported outside Anglophonia. For the few years while his effective enthusiasm lasted, Mensa France shot up in numbers to over a thousand. Expansion ceased abruptly when he retired as Chairman. I toured France with him that year on a publicity tour in which we did the usual round of interviews, radio and television appearances. My French is fairly fluent so both he and I spoke to Mensa groups in Paris, Nice, Cannes, Marseilles, Lyon, and other towns I have forgotten.
But I must mention Nice where I met an enthusiastic young Mensan psychologist, Jean-Paul Terrassier. He had an interest in pediatrics and able children. I told him about the gifted children's movement in the UK and USA.
I have written of my early contacts in the USA with the American pioneers of that movement. I had reported this in my first Mensa book and had been approached by a pediatric nursing sister, Margaret Branch, for material for a television story on the subject. I had loaned her all the books and literature I had collected from the USA and she went on to publicise the idea and to found the British National Association for Gifted Children of which I have always been a member.
I told Jean-Paul this story at a dinner party and asked about the chance of a French association on the same lines. He was positive and later did indeed set up the French 'Association National pour les Enfants Surdou�s' (ANPES), which developed well and still survives. Jean-Paul has become famous internationally for his work with gifted children.
The 1971 American AG was at Houston and two hundred members turned up. Sander Rubin was re-elected to the Chair. He proved to be a good chairman and the Committee he chaired laid the organisational foundations of the expansion which followed his term.
There was an IGC Meeting in Paris with a lot of publicity and some rewarding meetings of minds.
I had been nominated for a post on the British Mensa Committee as well as for the post of International Chairman and I was somewhat embarrassingly elected at the top of the poll in Britain. l had not known that the Unity Slate would be unopposed and I was hedging my bets in my desire to get back into the action, building Mensa at a time when auguries were good.
There was other bad news and good news. The bad news was that on 10 October, the first President of Mensa, Professor Sir Cyril Burt, died. The good news was that his death at the age of eighty-five ensured that he should never know of the vicious world campaign of ideologically motivated character assassination which was performed on his reputation later.
Possibly I have become too emotional about this late friend of mine and of Mensa. His help and influence over many years had been a decisive factor in our success. Without his many interventions and active help I would never have persuaded psychologists in many lands to give the aid that was essential in Mensa's progress towards psychological respectability.
This seems to be the moment to mention another famous psychologist who was a Mensa friend. Professor Raymond Cattell, another very supportive psychologist introduced by Burt (whose pupil he had been). Many Mensa members were tested as Berrill had been and I myself had been on his Superior Adult's Test, of which Mensa must have used millions of copies.
I have had a thirty year correspondence friendship with this expatriate Briton who ran the Institute of Personality and Ability Testing at his University in Illinois. I only met him once when he addressed an American Annual Gathering in Chicago in 1974. He has been a constant and faithful supporter of Mensa through bad times and good.
British Mensa was at a low ebb in 1971 and there seemed to be fewer local groups. The decline had been slow but continuous although the trend was to change as the effects of the first Superbrain competition began to be seen.
George Atherton gave up as editor then though he was to resume later. A young member from Canada who had been coming to parties at my house took over. Tony Buzan was the best editor of the International Journal we had had until then. Suddenly it was lively, controversial, intense and full of good authors. Buzan was one of a little group around a London American member, the polymath journalist and prolific writer, the late Heinz Norden. Round him there formed a group of young members. Tony Buzan was one and another of that vital and later significant group was the inventive entrepreneur and Mensa activist, John McNulty.
Today Tony's broadcasts and books, published in many languages, have given him international fame. His especial line is the development of human mental potential.
1972 saw the end of the plateau on the American Mensa growth curve with the publication of the first Superbrain competition. It appeared in the TV Guide and membership shot up from 12,400 to 16,400 that year in a trend that was to continue until it began to level off again in 1980.
Mensa journals began to discuss the appointment of a new president to replace Sir Cyril and there was much argument and discussion in central circles. A few wanted me as a candidate but Marvin Grosswirth suggested that Professor Buckminster Fuller had made just the kind of international reputation built on applied intelligence that would be the right image.
I was back on the British Committee and was able to work up some successful publicity schemes in England as well as to do my work on the International Committee where the main problem was to repair the finances after the period of extravagance under the previous regime. The main international meeting that year was in Aachen. The International Committee and the British Committee had, without realising it at the time, the same basic problem. Both lacked a sound, stable and enterprising professional base such as Margot Seitelman had built up in the growing suite of offices in her apartment building in Brooklyn.
The SIGRIM-nominated panel had set up a little office run by a housewife in Brighton much as I had done in London and New York. The excellent and efficient lady was a good secretary but would not claim the sort of versatile self-starter entrepreneurial ability that we had found in Margot and later in Harold Gale.
British Mensa, in its urgent desire to 'be master in its own house' after Mensa's internationalisation, had shifted the office to Wolverhampton where the current chairman, John Lishman, lived. This did not work all that well compared with what came later.
The staff were constantly changing, poorly paid and supervised because there was no effective professional boss in charge. It was the old problem of leaving control to a changing series of elected officials popping in in their spare lime. Though British Mensa began to get more applications the results in membership were disappointing.
As International Chairman that year I did another American Mensa tour with lots of publicity again. I think I was first at the Canadian Annual Gathering in Toronto and then at the American one in Denver. After those organised by Codella, none of my American and other tours abroad were at the expense of Mensa. Some were arranged when I had to make business trips, some were out of my personal holiday budget and some were partly funded by Mensa local groups who wanted to attract me to their town for the sake of the publicity. These trips cost me little because I was offered such generous hospitality (and warm friendship) by Mensa hosts and hostesses everywhere.
My tour that year included Louisville where there was a television show at the airport and the newspaper interview that produced my favourite headline about me: 'INTERVIEW WITH A MAN NOT BURDENED WITH HUMILITY'.
Some will have guessed that my outrageously unhumble posture is a gimmick, a little deliberate and posed. But I do have a real point. A decent degree of self-regard is not harmful and the fashion for an exaggerated outward show of humility has gone too far. Further, I am sure that the able people I meet in Mensa lose more by overdone humility than they would by overdone pride. I recommend a realistic but sanguine self-assessment which bides behind a teasing mock pride. I do not recommend humility: it is nothing to be proud of.
Only obvious and excessive over-achievers like Clive Sinclair and the present Pope can afford to be really humble. You have to be very good indeed and very sure of yourself to be that humble and still be respected and effective.
In 1972 British Mensa broke important new ground when it arranged for its members to use the Arts Theatre Club, which had been founded by a member. Members then had a place where they could meet and have small functions. I am a member of the Savage Club which is for those who work in the Arts, my qualification being as a writer. I used to have my Think-In meetings in the comfortable library there but we were not allowed to use the members' bar. The Arts Theatre Club was much better as all members were welcomed at all times. I transferred the Think-In events to the Arts Theatre Club when that connection was made.
There should be more of this kind of development. It seems still to be true that London is the only big city where any Mensan from anywhere can find Mensa company, restaurant, bar, other services and accommodation on club premises.
The club which accommodates Mensa today is that enormous turretted Victorian pile on the Embankment, the National Liberal Club. This is a monument to the past pre-eminence of the British Liberal party (which is now a rather shrunken but very hopeful rump). It keeps going by opening its splendid revolving doors to other groups like Mensa.
In 1973 American Mensa continued its new surge and achieved a peak membership of nearly 16,500. It was at this point that we got our first Reader's Digest exposure. It was achieved by Margot and her helpers at the New York office. We have had several of these now. We get a one page simple puzzle quiz in that journal with a little background about Mensa and an address. Each of these has produced a dramatic deluge of applications and a sharp increase in membership wherever Mensa has had the local organisational strength to cope. The Reader's Digest publishes in many countries so that this American achievement was very good news, but a challenging problem to the struggling little national Mensas. To American Mensa it was the best kind of stimulus because they were well equipped. By 1975 there were to be 20,000 members at the peak. (The peak under the annual billing system comes in March when subscriptions become due. This causes an apparent slump in paid-up membership in April which causes an apparent drop of approximately eight or nine thousand in membership as the office waits for the dues to trickle in. Britain uses year-round billing which spreads the work load and cuts out these dramatic seasonal tosses. Another British advantage in this respect is the facility for payment by banker's order which is not usual in the USA.
In America in 1972 under the Chairman Sander Rubin there was a continuation of the harassment on the American Mensa officers with some members being extremely unhelpful and contentions. Rubin handled this with persistence and patience. But American Mensa was static.
1973 was the year that Marvin Grosswirth took the chair of the AMC. The kindly, universally liked and respected Marvin began to suffer from the same problems from which Sander Rubin had been suffering and from which the International Mensa had freed itself.
There were very contentions, long, miserable meetings of the committee in New York. Often working by proxy, the dedicated objectors and obstructors moved in to create difficulties. The disputes were incredibly complex and could only be understood through long, close study. I had no notion of what they were about although I had all the reams of reports and papers about them. Scalding intemperate accusations and long patient explanations and refutations were what they seemed like. Boring beyond belief they really were. Marvin (Job) Grosswirth with tact, patience, firmness, persistence and tough-minded resistance to threats and coercion, held the fort and kept things afloat.
Then the Litigious Men of Straw moved in with senseless but troublesome lawsuits called at remote locations against Marvin and his colleagues in American Mensa. An appeal fund was launched and funds for legal fees were donated by members to protect those who took all this nonsense because they loved and worked for Mensa.
This damaging nonsense went on for a long time and caused endless problems and waste of time but in the end every one of the suits was settled or withdrawn with a favourable outcome from the Mensa point of view. The problems caused as much revulsion among members as they had in England but, strangely, in another way they strengthened and consolidated Mensa's fragile unity in the end. Marvin was so patently decent, honest, long-suffering and patient that a ground swell of support welled up from the grass roots in local groups which finally led to better times and a resumption of the spectacular growth of American Mensa.
1973 was also the year of the next International Election and the Serebriakoff panel was returned with a good majority vote against another panel which was based on a Canadian group. The international panel contained a number of American members in deference to the increasing American membership. I was very busy in my business and also because of the growing burden of work as international chairman, but I had the odd experience of being the only person that I know of to lose my place on the British Mensa Committee due to one of those rules imposed by a floor motion at the AGM. According to this curious rule a committee member had to get prior permission by a motion to be excused attendance. I was a world traveller selling an innovation. I could not know six weeks before of the need for a trip, so I was summarily dismissed for absence without prior leave after missing some. I can claim from subsequent work when I was elected later that such rules can rob Mensa of useful workers for no good reason.
British Mensa was to suffer much from such impulsive floor motions passed in the excitement and passion of a crowded Annual General Meeting. This system was a tradition left from our informal beginnings and it throws a curious light on intelligent people in the mass. As I have said intelligence works in teams and a crowd of very bright people are capable of a collective decision which seems stupid to any thoughtful individual.
In Britain there were vigorous and good publicity campaigns which were ineffective because there was not the office organisation to cope with the flow of enquiries that came in. British Mensa began to set into a mess financially because of overspending and the excellent newsletter edited by Steve Odell had to shut down for a time. It reappeared, without Steve, in a sadly slim and shoddy form after a month or two. The British Committee adhered to the expensive practice of issuing a separate sheet to British members and not combining it with the International Journal which continued to be well printed and edited by Tony Buzan.
In America things were very good and 1974 saw a big increase in American membership with the March peak at 20,000. The American Activities Bulletin was improving markedly and was well printed and readable. It included the International Journal which came from the IGC.
That year, the aged Professor Buckminster Fuller became the second World President of Mensa.
In May British Mensa suffered a minor schism as Channel Islands Mensa broke away, having been dissatisfied with the magazine service.
Both Buckminster Fuller and Professor Raymond Cattell spoke at the American Annual Gathering at Chicago where a record crowd of 450 members turned up. Chicago was then a good spot for Mensa and a leading light was Charlie Fallon who had been a tough and staunch Mensa defender in the days of difficulty, especially in Chicago. Another business trip was combined with a holiday so I managed yet another wide Mensa tour with the usual big publicity and very warm and hospitable American welcome everywhere. All this was organised at local level by the many friends I now had in America.
I remember Chicago well because it was a turning point. The outlying members in the local groups had at last begun to accept that which they found hard to believe at first. People of goodwill and decency, that is to say the overwhelming majority of Mensans, began to accept that there really are ill-disposed members or sincere self-deceiving ones, who harass elected Mensa workers without just cause. There is no smoke without fire but seeing smoke does not tell us who lit the fire. The boring old accusations of autocracy, suppressing 'legitimate criticism', and fixing elections which were hurled indiscriminately at any one who was vicious enough to win an election, were patently absurd when applied to the patient, friendly, compassionate chairman Marvin Grosswirth. So it was the accusers who came under fire. They were a tiny group of people who seemed to be acting from an inbuilt hatred of anything that could be set up as an 'authority' or indeed anyone who achieved any prominence. They get frustrated. They get nasty.
At Chicago there was a very healthy and overdue counter-attack from the local secretaries and local journal editors from the very constituency the disruptors relied on to create uproar. Uproar there was but they themselves were its victims.
It was not easy in a society which is divided by its very protean principles, but a sense of order and unity in Mensa was growing stronger. It was a fine meeting with quite the atmosphere of intellectual interaction that I remembered from the early days. One of those who came to the fore in American Mensa at this time was Gabriel Werba, who had been elected as American Ombudsman. He was helpful to Mensa in the troubles I have been describing. He later served on the IGC under my chairmanship and later still was American Chairman.
There was a meeting of the IGC there with myself as Chairman and we tried to set up an international phone link with Mensa in Austria and France. It was a badly stage-managed failure. My fault.
I talked with Charlie Fallon who was coming to the fore as the best known Chicago M. We wanted a survey to be funded by International to investigate the gifted children problem using Mensans as a convenient sample of those who once were gifted children. Their experiences might throw light on the best educational methods for the gifted. Charlie proposed one of our Mensa academics for the job.
Professor Philip M. Powell was at that time a lecturer in psychology at Yale. His beginnings in life had not pointed to academe. He told me about a delinquent black youth from the seamier part of Chicago where he had been a gang leader. Someone had dared him into applying for Mensa, and such kids have to take up dares. Philip was accepted with a maximum score. Hooked on Mensa and learning things, he found he could not kick the habits. So the poor man finished up at the University of Yale. And worse, as a lecturer! He now has a fine family of bright kids and a good career.
In Britain Dr George Athenon became British Mensa Chairman at another smaller AGM at The Victory Ex-Services Club near Marble Arch.
In the office in Brooklyn that year Margot and her gradually growing team struggled manfully with a great surge of enquiries from another Reader's Digest quiz. American membership soared and the same quiz published later in Britain helped there too. But the organisation was poorer. The American membership peaked next year at nearly 22,000 but Britain lifted out of decline by only a little.
In 1975, glowing with the success of the renewed growth, American Mensa started something which proved to be a vital and important step forward and which was to break new ground for the rest. First and most importantly the committee meetings ceased to be in New York. Charlie Fallon became the American Chairman and began to arrange a peripatetic series of meetings around America which did much to increase the contact of the Committee with the members and also to give members more opportunities to meet each other. It was the answer to the disruptive pamphleteers who were now writing about real people and not the far away figures you read about.
That year the Committee met in three locations: San Antonio, Chicago and Atlanta. The latter two were the Regional Gatherings or RGs, which were now to become an important activity in American Mensa and elsewhere. Without Charlie's important initiative it would have proved to be much more difficult to preserve the unity both of American and International Mensa over the years. Growth and dispersal present problems and the shape of the solution was appearing. From then on I began to get many reports from returning visitors of these excellent events.
Clive Sinclair was especially impressed and the RGs renewed his close interest in Mensa.
Each Regional Gathering has its own special flavour and these reflect the delightful cultural diversity which is a special feature of Mensa in America. It is an aspect that is often missed by the casual foreign visitor who sees only the mono-cultural exterior which coyly bides the delightful, subtle, sweet, and protean local cultural savours beneath. Mensa seems to bring them out.
There are scores of them every year and Mensans vote increasingly with their cash and their feet in favour of them. The attendance varies between thirty and twelve hundred or so and they are usually held in a good convention-type hotel. There are all the locals and a faithful crowd of Mensans from further afield who seem to go to many or most of them. The Friday evening registration is usually an uproarious affair with people falling into each other's arms like long parted sisters and brothers. Mensans and especially American Ms either started or were early to follow the modem habit of increased physical contact on greeting. Soon bugging became a Mensa cult with a Hugger's Special Interest Group run by Jimmee Stein. There were even hugger's competitions at many RGs for a time. It may be laughable but it was something that had to happen. Intelligent people are still people. They have bodies and the usual emotions and the need for caresses. They are different, at an extreme of human variation on one parameter. Those at the extremes, any of them, may have a body-love and physical approval problem, an unsatisfied hunger. It is right and proper that Mensa members should have a permissiveness about bodily contact and reassurance between them. The condition is that it is not abused or considered compulsory. Sensitivity is needed. We offer, do not press our contact. There was in fact a reaction to overdone hugging later.
Too many of the brighter people, like early Christians, have hidden feelings of rejection and, to my own amazement one of the real advantages that members found in Mensa was in this unexpected area.
There is usually a great deal of variety in the RG programme. There are workshops and seminars on a great variety of topics, all in separate rooms and each drawing in a crowd of enthusiasts for whatever special interest is concerned; education; gifted children; local newsletters; computers; sociology; psychology; man-woman relationships; logic; philosophy; religion; the occult; fundamental physics; mathematics; hypnotism; higher education; lower education; anarchism; love and marriage; sexism; puzzles; chess and other board games; computer games. These are some of the subjects that may be dealt with in the many little meetings which last all through the weekend. Outdoors in the hotel grounds they will be throwing boomerangs, flying kites, swimming and always, everywhere, continuously and incessantly arguing, discussing and disputing anything and everything.
Meals? Only exceptionally are these really good. At the public meals we usually get the standard American conference banquet which is all right if you love bland, meek, submissive food served with pallid inoffensive coffee. English tongues are tolerant but tongues educated in Europe or the East, grow limp and wilt a bit.
There is always the secretary of the local gourmet's SIG who will lead those with the more adventurous tongues, who like wine with food, to the secret local delicacy or to the standard but excellent Italian, Chinese, Jewish, Spanish, Mexican or Japanese restaurant.
And yes, the physical side goes a bit further than hugging and some wicked members sleep around a bit after the numerous fairly alcoholic but friendly parties in private rooms. This is an unvarnished tale and I shamefully admit that a Regional Gathering is to a small extent, the place where the eggheads get laid.
So when the assembled Mensans go off to the airport there are some very sad and almost tearful farewells after a Mensa gathering. We go away renewed, refreshed and intoxicated with thought and talk and waiting for the next time.
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1976 saw the further steady growth of American Mensa with another record attendance of five hundred of the 24,500 members at the San Antonio AG. The peripatetic AMC meetings got into full swing with the AMC meetings at Santa Barbara, Detroit, Kansas City and Boston. The new team with Fallon as Chairman and Werba (who had gained reputation as Ombudsman), as first Vice Chairman was now a responsible and constructive one. The specialists in long, whining, incomprehensible memoranda and meritless lawsuits seem to have disappeared in the electoral process. The expensive lawsuits dragged on for years. None succeeded.
American Committee meetings now took on a much more business-like and constructive air and the results were visible in growth, activity and atmosphere in American Mensa. It had learned its lesson and stopped being over-tolerant of its dedicated contention-lovers.
At the international level in 1976 another Serebriakoff panel of candidates won the election without too much problem. International Mensa was in fair heart but under increasing pressure from the American Mensa Committee to cut the international component of the subscriptions.
Cuts had been made and despite this the inherited deficit reduced and a surplus built up. My plan was to build up the reserves to finance a move to plant the successful American recruitment methods in other countries. But I had to engineer consent for it and that was not easy.
The first essential was to create a revenue producing a[sic] self-sustaining office like that which the redoubtable Margot had built up in America. It was going to be a risky venture and in retrospect we were too cautious, we delayed the adventure too long.
A young bank official, David Warren, was the International Treasurer and over a number of years he tough-mindedly and competently guided us in a cautious policy of economy and retrenchment to build up reserves. We took no risks and helped aspiring new Mensas only with small grant loans and any help that could be given by we amateurs in our spare time. A pool of international members was built up and we planned and budgeted with the hopes of establishing the essential professional base but dared not take the plunge in view of a quite natural feeling coming from the AMC. They claimed to represent all American members who provided eighty percent of the cash because of their numbers. Although the eight officers of the IGC were elected by the votes of all members, including Americans, it was the AMC that controlled the subscriptions of which the IGC took twelve, then ten, then eight percent. Some of the AMC thought they saw better uses for the money in America.
I became distracted by an idea that had been festering in my mind for years. Back in 1958 there had been a period during which I had what I saw as an insight concerning self-organising systems. This had obsessed me for a time after meeting with many pioneers in the cybernetics field that I found in Mensa and in the Philosophy of Science Society.
After brooding on my ideas and reading everything I could find on information theory, cybernetics, neurology, computers and theories of social organisation. I had managed to find an adventurous publisher to publish my book Brain, which was an attempt by an autodidact outsider to propose a theory of self-organising intercommunicating systems. I felt that in systems like human organisations and institutions, markets, cells, and brains had common tasks and methods and that there were ways of understanding them in a generalised form. Working on this difficult book, which I confess does not really communicate well enough, and then, when it was published that year, answering letters and giving university lectures on it, took up a lot of the reduced time I could spare from my now rather tough job.
British Mensa was a worry then as things were not going at all well since the internationalisation split. The British Committee was constantly changing, there were a series of short term chairmen who were none too inspiring, there was no one to take the essential central role of the vitally needed 'motivator who keeps his eye on the ball'. And the Committee was divided and distracted by the same dissidence problems which the International, American and Australian Mensas had suffered and resolved or outlasted.
There were endless damaging quarrels, arguments, lawsuits and childish pamphleteering. The reduced newsletter was full of accusations and refutations. Much of the lengthy, incomprehensible nonsense which fascinates the participants and bores everyone else was circulated.
Exploiting the Superbrain idea in March British Mensa got many new members but many others resigned and lapsed in apathy or disgust. Very large numbers of these rejoined in the better days that were to come. Things were at a very low ebb. There were fiscal problems, and a member tried to get a special Annual General Meeting called (apparently thinking this extra expense and a big meeting would help somehow). The Committee resisted. There was also an argument about loans and expenses claims. All were trivial in comparison with the final heavy legal costs.
All this led to another interminable, incomprehensible, complex dispute which rolled on for years and finally cost British Mensa members very large sums in legal fees, resisting lawsuits by litigious men of straw who had little to lose and represented themselves in court.
British Mensa was deep in debt and the first task of the newly elected International Committee was to bail it out with a loan to prevent default. As International Chairman I insisted on conditions.
Here was the chance to get the professional office we needed both for British and International Mensa. This was the plan and the condition. We closed down the little home IGC office in Brighton and, merging it with the British one in Wolverhampton, we built up to the required minimum effective office scale. The economies meant that we could afford a professional boss for the whole operation, to be called the Executive Director. To avoid disputes about priorities there was to be a little company called Mensa Administration Ltd with a board appointed by the IGC on one side and the BMC on the other and with an independent chairman. The International General Secretary at the time was Ian Palmer, a pioneer of data base programs for computers. He set up a small committee which found a schoolmaster who was willing to take on this unpromising job and that is how Harold Gale was appointed as Executive Director both of British and International Mensa.
He was engaged in April 1976 with a brief to make economies, get British Mensa back on the rails and repay the international Joan. He was to start serious recruiting in non-Mensa countries and service the British and international committees. It was an uphill job at first as he tried to establish his authority and deal with the muddled fiscal and legal problems in the UK.
In 1977 American membership peaked at 2,000 and American Mensa continued to run smoothly apart from the fading aftermath of the lawsuits.
This was 'Get Burt' year for the press of the western world. Our late president came under fire in an organised international campaign of journalistic post mortem character assassination.
I published a counter-attack on Burt-bashers and weighed into them in the book I was writing for an American publisher called Test Your Child's IQ which was published in many languages subsequently. My collaborator, who composed and validated the tests, was a Chicago Mensan, Dr Stephen Langer. There was an IGC meeting with more than usual overseas representation in Paris and an International Mensa Congress in Bristol.
The 1977 British AGM was a black disgrace to Mensa. It was, and it shames me deeply to admit it, almost, but mercifully not quite, as bad as a bad question time in the British House of Commons. The numbers in British Mensa were down and a version of Gresham's Law applied. At this kind of meeting a claque of the noisy and obstreperous members drove out the majority of well behaved ones. It was the same bad time for British Mensa as those in Australia, America and International.
In a long, noisy, confused and disorderly meeting there was the spectacle, in a society of intelligent people, of both the Chairman and the Secretary being unable to establish order and resigning on the spot. High intelligence is no defence against mass stupidity.
In morphostatic systems (self-sustaining ones that preserve form through time), and Mensa was proving to be one, trend lines are contra-indicative because such systems are homeostatic. British Mensa had gone down enough. When Harold Gale started there were just 1,350 members left out of the more than 4,000 I had handed on to British Mensa in 1962.
But from then on British Mensa began to get well and grow. In 1984, eight years later, British Mensa had just ten times the membership Harold started with at that low point. How that happened is an interesting story with a moral.
In the 1977 American election there was another sound political move in American Mensa: regionalisation. The central committee was augmented by a number of Regional Vice Chairmen. There were now fifteen instead of nine members and much more input as to what was going on all around American Mensa. I believe this strengthened and unified and is a pattern that could well be copied elsewhere. I feel it will prove to be a better way of doing it than that recently adopted in French Mensa where the regionalisation has been more thoroughgoing. Both experiments are of great importance and we shall learn much from the way they work out respectively. My own worry comes from the fear that if the catchment area of a Mensa selection agency is too small, it cannot be self-sustaining and produce surpluses. Decentralisation is good up to a point but we should try all patterns and avoid rigidity in our effort to preserve our fundamental form.
In American Mensa the test income from the Reader's Digest quiz had given the financial strength to afford good professional publicity advice such as that we had had from Codella and this began to show in excellent exposure with a consequent lift in applications, test fees and thus more money for publicity in a self-reinforcing chain reaction. The talented publicist behind all this was Alice Fixx, wife of James Fixx, a Mensan who helped Mensa with an excellent puzzle book which popularised Mensa. Alice had been doing, unobtrusively, a very professional job with and for Margot and Mensa. I suspect that she had no small part in her husband's world fame.
AMC meetings in 1978 were at Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis and Portland with the AG at Cleveland. In March that year there were reports of major Mensa international meetings in Geneva, Santa Barbara, the Catskills, Dundalk, Paris, London, and most important Philip Poole's well organised and splendid International Congress on the Channel Islands where we had the States, that is virtually the King and Queen of the islands, present at the sumptuous formal dinner.
French Mensa benefitted a lot from a publicity meeting in Nice for the French Gifted Children's Movement which was now beginning to flourish under the leadership of jean Charles Terrassier. I was invited as one lecturer. The press attention was intense and I got hundreds of French clippings later. The journals took the cautious, quizzing, critical line, with the ritual lip service to anti-elitism.
Yet I could see a real but underground constituency in France for the ideas that inspire both Mensa and the French Gifted Children's Movement ANPES.
Unashamed recognition of mental differences and heretical discussions about finding, educating and using human talent from all social and racial origins for the general benefit is largely taboo among modem intellectuals, even in France, because of the fashionable egalitarian and anti-elitist ethos.
There is no mystery about today's clerical treason. It arises simply from the fear of Marxism. Eyes are closed to real genetic and cultural differences because they are secretly seen as influencing class differences. About these Marx made frightening predictions.
I do not believe in the risk of class war because class analysis is too crude. Class structure is more changeable, complex and permeable than Karl's simplistic binary theory would have it. The wars we now have, even those that can be depicted as class wars, are really intercultural battles. I see no interclass ones.
When, as in Nice that year, bold or foolish heretics resist our century's damaging anti-sapience, anti-mind, anti-life, anti-excellence trend, break the taboo, and sound off, the attention and interest is vital and fascinated. Taboo talk enthralls. This is why, after nearly 40 years Mensa is always fresh news, again and again.
1978 saw another miserable year in British Mensa with another uninspiring and quarrelsome AGM in Birmingham.
But, under the surface, things were better as Gale began to reorganise in Wolverhampton. The British Activities Bulletin kept getting worse under a series of ever changing editors and the members, especially the new ones that were now beginning to join, began to complain. The last straw for me was December that year when the cover was a hippy figure with a joint dragging from his lip, snapping his grubby fingers and saying 'See you at the AG man'. Possibly even worse was a series where an enormous Mensa logo mercifully and completely obscured the close print on the front page. This Bulletin was supposed to be the attractive lure to retain the new members. That is the bad news. Something would have to be done.
This is the good news. 850 members attended the American AG in Cleveland, Ohio. With professional publicity and an expanding staff in Brooklyn membership continued to soar. American regionalisation with local democracy was a success.
In fact 1979 was the beginning of a trend-setting epoch, though again it could not be seen at the time. It started with the gradual accentuation of the transatlantic rift of which there had always been some sign.
British Mensa and all non-American Mensas had not matched the strong American progress and eighty percent of our 42,000 Mensans were then American. The American committee had been enlarged and strengthened and unified under Charlie Fallon. That electorate had rejected the fractious and contentious ones and the AMC was now confident and optimistic.
The IGC under my chairmanship was also working smoothly but its task of pioneering in new countries was more difficult and its success was less spectacular. Certainly the new administration in Wolverhampton and the appointment of the very hard-working and devoted psychologist Abby Salny as psychological adviser had made it possible to start steady recruitment in non-Mensa countries but this was moderate. The international skein of isolated members, the seed corn of later national Mensas was rising by some hundreds each year. But that looked small beer by American progress.
Elected by all members, the International General Committee usually met in London. It had the central responsibility for Mensa, the whole.
In the American Committee this was seen as gross imbalance. One of the seventeen national constituencies (some of them tiny) which made up the whole, America, was four times the size of the rest put together. Under the international constitution no one had foreseen such a thing.
There was a vote for each of the internationally elected panel of eight officers but also each national Mensa, however small, had one vote (the same bad principle as the United Nations Assembly). Eight votes represented all members (including Americans) directly, sixteen votes represented non-American members. Only one vote represented the eighty percent of American members via their own committee.
It did not work out too badly because in fact the many little Mensas only rarely voted. But anomalous it had become. Everyone agreed there would have to be a new constitution.
Because of this imbalance, looking to our main constituency (and paymaster), America, we had a practice not to pass a motion where the American representative's proxy (usually Tony Littman) was against it. We also had a budget committee under the American Treasurer's control.
But some of my good American friends could not distinguish well between British Mensa (which was in a mess) and International Mensa (which was not).
To AMC eyes the International Committee met in Europe, mostly in England the founding country. They were seen as all the same inefficient bunch. It looked, maybe with eighteenth century eyes, like English colonialism all over again. The phrases 'The tail is wagging the dog', and 'taxation without representation', and threats of a 'Boston Tea Party' appeared more and more on the scolding but always friendly letters I got from my American Committee contacts. The American Committee wanted more say in International Mensa. The fact that their members had voted for the international officers did not satisfy them. The AMC treasurer had to sign the cheques.
I wanted nothing less than the mildly threatened American breakaway, but domination by one national Mensa would be bad too. I knew it would be a long uphill job to do what had to be done. To get a world-wide Mensa we had to create a balance by growing vigorously elsewhere.
But I had been too opportunistic with my numerous American publicity tours, getting members where it was easiest. I had done much to create the problem. Now I had to solve it if Mensa was to remain as one, which was and is my passionate desire.
I decided to stand again as candidate for International Chairman if I could in concert with Charlie Fallon, the outgoing American Chairman, and a more American team so that we could get influential and effective Americans interested in the international problem. I wanted a united team of which the Americans could really feel part.
Charlie said he found the idea of a Serebriakoff/Fallon Slate in the 1979 election favourable but asked for time to decide. According to our thinking, after the election and a hand-over period, I was to be 'kicked upstairs' to a non-executive honorific rote and help with the publicity tours I was so experienced in after my retirement. He was to tell me by the end of 1978 which was a bit tight for comfort. My own electoral following in America was very strong by now and he had to get a strong slate to run against me if he decided to.
Charlie's decision was to go it alone. He left me waiting till past the agreed decision date. This was politically astute as it left me less time to adjust to the change of tack. Only when I phoned him in January 1979 did I learn that he intended to run an opposing slate. It was a crucial decision and much flowed from it.
Charlie got together a formidable slate of popular people. Himself as Chairman, Gabriel Werba almost certainly the incoming American Chairman, the much loved Harper Fowley, a very successful and effective West Coast Mensa stalwart, Len Rickard, Karl Ross, the hard-working Bulletin Editor, the English accountant and experienced Mensa activist, Tony Littman,John Meredith, a British banker, and Professor Philip Powell.
Short of time, I also got together a slate, contended the election, and won again by a comfortable margin during 1979. My slate had four Americans including a past AMC Treasurer, Art Gardner, Philip Powell (also), Jan Williams and James Sprague, three Britons: Dr Athenon, Dr Madsen Pirie, and myself. The eighth member was Karl Schnoelzer.
This International election result was not received with acclamations of wild joy by the American Committee which came under the leadership of the new Chairman, Gabe Werba, that June. We started a new period of contention in Mensa but this time it was a civil and orderly contest between decent people.
I had decided to retire from my industrial job and, even during that last year of nine to five in which I was handing over to my successor, I had more spare time and tackled what I saw as the Mensa transatlantic problem in this way. Something dramatic had to be done in Europe and the starting place could only be the UK.
I looked around for help and turned to an old friend. I have spoken of Clive Sinclair when he was the thin, carrot-haired youth of nineteen I first met at some Mensa do and sat with in a car all night, deep in fascinated talk. He impressed me enormously then. Today he is one of the growing band of distinguished and famous people who became so as members.
We had to wait for this to happen because those already famous have a disincentive to risk failure to qualify by applying to join Mensa. They do not know of, or knowing, do not see why they should trust, the confidentiality of our selection agency. (It is, truly, very strict. I as President may not find out the name of an unsuccessful applicant.)
A few bold spirits among the famous - Leslie Charteris, Isaac Asimov, Don Pederson, the President of the Ford Motor Company, Jimmy Savile - have been sure enough, bold enough or trusting enough to risk the dread Mensa test. But not many. One of these risk takers is the very famous TV cook/humorist and British MP, Clement Freud. He published a lovely knocking article with the headline, 'CLEMENT FREUD, MENSA (FAILED)'.
But Clive (now Professor Sir Clive), Sinclair was one of our home-grown heroes and a beloved personal friend. He seems to have had an article about his achievements in every magazine on earth so I shall not recount them more than to remind you that he started by designing and selling match box radios without capital from his lodgings and went on to design and market the first really commercial pocket calculator in the world which really did fit into the pocket. He made his first million pounds from a capital base of nothing. The stream of electronic and other innovations from the team he built up, much of it from Mensa contacts he says, reminds me of our joint hero, Eddington. And now between the ZX80 and 81, the Spectrum, and the QL personal computers, his companies have sold far more computers than any other company on earth.
Mensa has to thank the many warm American Regional Gatherings for Clive's renewed interest in and enormous contribution to Mensa. Obviously he had been put off by the bad years I have described in British Mensa but he told me with delight how good he had found it, wandering round America on many business trips, to find convenient friendly convivial groups of interesting like-minded people in Mensa everywhere. That rare, golden commodity, good talk, was to be found easily around the American Mensa scene. Praise of American Mensa hospitality is universal.
Knowing how intense was his preoccupation with the expression and realisation of his innovative genius I had never pressed him for help. But now, I was getting (though not feeling) older. I was desperate to preserve my vision of a truly international league of multicultural comprehenders that which seemed to threaten it.
An old man in a hurry, encouraged by Clive's good report from America, I asked Clive to be further over-extended as the 'busy man' to whom one gives the new, difficult, trouble-shooting job.
His rapidly growing prestige was certainly going to help Mensa with its bad British image. After the dedicated industrious mud-fighting by the fractious few, Mensa was publicly seen as Brain-proud Quarrelsome Under-achievers Limited.
So the busiest of men in the country and its most obvious over-achiever let himself be persuaded to join a campaign to revive and reinvigorate British Mensa. We were going to improve its image and make it what Berrill said he had failed to make it, a pleasure to belong to. How? By gaining from and improving on the best American experience. And John McNulty, another of our home grown inventors and a long time friend of mine and Clive's, was in there, too.
And there was another. Dr Madsen Pirie was a Mensan who turned up at a Think-In which was then being held at The National Liberal Club. He won my heart by actually understanding and liking my almost incomprehensible book Brain (as Clive did), and I was vastly impressed by his erudition, his brilliant use of language, and extraordinary ability to think on his feet at an exceptionally profound level. He was the President of the Adam Smith Institute which was then a tiny new political Think Tank.
I picked a winner because he has achieved national fame in a few years by a succession of brilliant publicity campaigns which have had a strikingly visible effect on British politics. Madsen is another Mensan who has built a team which makes things happen. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, found it necessary publicly to deny that the Adam Smith Institute was making Government policy. That Madsen's ideas get close attention in high quarters has not been denied.
In that year, 1979, Madsen impulsively accepted my nomination as an international candidate and was catapulted into Mensa politics overnight as International General Secretary when we won the Election. Both Clive and I stood for office on the British Mensa Committee and were both elected in November 1979. It was for me like a place bet in case l lost the International Election. Embarrassingly I won both.
The British Mensa Newsletter was now being edited by Michael Clift, who had certainly improved it but soon came under fire from the many unconstructive critics around Mensa at the time. The Bulletin was still full of quarrelsome, meaningless disputes. Clift published the slanging and his own counter-slanging. It could hardly help being better than before; edifying it was not.
A member I knew who was an executive for the Reader's Digest, Ian Redpath, phoned me to bitch about the magazine and I persuaded him to offer to be Editor. He did and the newsletter was once more readable.
The American AG was a rather splendid affair at Kansas City and since I was invited to give a speech I went.
The British AG in Liverpool marked a return to sanity because of the same sort of grass roots revolt that had happened in America. The claque of disruptives were outvoted by postal votes or by the fact that trusted members were there with masses of proxy votes. I had twenty or so unsolicited ones and one member had collected sixty. In any case the membership was increasing and there were lots of new members who could not be relied upon by the disrupters.
Under the constitution in British Mensa Ltd, which had been changed by referendum during the Chairmanship of John Lishman, any member could put a motion to the AG for general vote and there were thirty or so ill-thought out, unbudgeted, motions to be debated by a large meeting. There was no way they could be properly debated. British Mensa was in the same silly fix that some political parties get into. British Mensa had the problem of the Annual Conference Motions.
The idea that a meeting with hundreds present and thousands of postal voters can work on the same lines as a small committee is plain silly. But there is great resistance among those who enjoy the annual cathartic uproar to any change in this scheme of things. After a very unjust and unfair debate the editor was rejected by a motion and Ian Redpath replaced him. Most of the other silly motions were defeated. But one, that the editor should be an electoral post, was passed.
In the new committee I took the post of Developments Officer and so got back into a position to help with the growth and recruitment problem. I had done it before. Maybe I could do it again. Clive was now an active participant in a committee which remained under the Chairmanship of Michael Collier Bradley.
Clive's first thought was to create in England something as good as the American Regional Gathering. He was living in a lovely stone house in Cambridge at the time and his business was there. Working with John McNulty and myself, he proposed an annual week-long Gathering at one of the colleges with a holiday flavour but a strong intellectual content. This was the beginning of the now firmly established international Mensa feature 'Mensa At Cambridge' which is now almost a national institution in Britain as well as an international one in Mensa, judging by the growing popularity and press attention.
We are now in 1980. The international election result was declared and there began to be trouble on that front.
I remember being warned by American friends that Gabe Werba, the new American Chairman, was a 'hard-nosed' businessman whose professional job was shaking ailing companies back into efficiency and profit. This is what he was going to do with International Committee. If ways were not changed American Mensa would refuse to go on subsidising this dog-wagging tail in Europe, cast it off and go it alone.
This was the sense of the rumours. They were exaggerated I am sure, possibly deliberately.
The next two years saw big changes: very rapid growth in British Mensa; paralysis and politics in International Mensa; relative stagnation after the sharp growth in American Mensa; civilly conducted conflict and arguments around World Mensa. And then at the end peace, a new accord, a referendum and a new constitution which put the elected American Committee virtually in voting control of the international body for the time.
Early in 1980 the new American Chairman, Gabe Werba, came to England to negotiate with the newly elected IGC and there were a number of sticky meetings in which Gabe pressed the case that the new American Committee was making. The American Mensa Committee was under pressure for more funds for local activities and there was a need to show better results from the international expenditure. Further, there were objections to the fact that nearly all IGC meetings were held in London which meant that the many national Mensa representatives could only be represented by proxy. It was unfair, Gabe said, that the expenses of the national Mensa representatives had to be paid by the national Mensas, all delegates should attend and all should be funded out of international funds.
This demand was welcome to the smaller national Mensas and that ensured a majority for that decision on the committee. In fact from that time forward Gabe had gained the political initiative because the internationally elected officers (the Serebriakoff panel) were outvoted by the seventeen national representatives. Not all voted with Gabe but he soon won enough of them over after a good deal of telephone lobbying to have a majority.
Gabe Werba's further demands were that the change in the International Constitution, which the committee had been considering for some years, should now be pushed through quickly and it should be such as to give the American committee the voting strength relative to American membership and financial contribution. With eighty percent of members in America that would mean control of the international body by the American committee. Gabe also said that international development should be conducted to a budgeted plan with clear targets.
He was forthright and demanding but the atmosphere was not unfriendly. He represented himself as a dedicated internationalist in Mensa. But he said he was under pressure from his committee and grass roots members, some of whom were indifferent to the international aspect and concerned to cut the financial cost of the IGC.
As a result of another Reader's Digest quiz in 1979 American Membership peaked at 43,000 in 1980, a net gain of over ten thousand members in the year, a record that still holds. There were confident forecasts of continued growth in America. The American attitude on the IGC seemed reasonable to the smaller national representatives.
At a London meeting in January more of these national representatives turned up than usual and, after a private lunch together, Gabe and I prepared a statement which was to be agreed by the committee which he could take back to satisfy his committee.
We accepted that there should be a referendum for a new international constitution and asked Gabe to chair the committee to prepare the draft which was to be discussed at a meeting in Athens in November. We agreed to plan a budget on the lines he asked and generally accepted that the IGC had to take more account of the views of the American Committee.
Gabe did some canvassing and lobbying with the national representatives of the small national Mensas both then and later by telephone to press his point of view. He was active and persuasive and he soon gained the marginal control of the committee which was now divided into factions.
One faction was impressed with American growth and progress and welcomed Gabe's leadership, the other faction was worried about the idea of the international body being controlled virtually by a single committee which had been elected as the committee of one of the national Mensas, even though it was the largest.
Seven of the eight international officers, four Americans, three British and an Austrian, were behind me as Chairman and leader of the internationalist faction. The British, French, Austrian and Channel Islands representatives also voted with the internationalist faction and the rest tended to vote with Werba on the few questions of dispute. At first the contention was not great and we agreed on most things. The tension caused by the schism was constructive; it increased motivation and effort on both sides.
It was a year of international meetings, London, Charlotte (North Carolina), Paris and Athens, following the Werba plan that the international committee should become peripatetic so as to increase contact and gain in publicity.
The friction and dissent warmed up a little as the year went on and the lobbying and canvassing on both sides continued. I was worried because a very carefully prepared and budgeted continental development plan, prepared to meet Werba's ideas, was turned down flat by a vote so that all expenditure on the main job of the committee, developing new Mensas, ceased while the international travel expenses threatened to eat up the reserves that had been built up for this development effort. But politics is the art of the possible and we set up another more modest budget only to have that turned dawn later at Cambridge. 'We' were Clive Sinclair, Dr Madsen Pirie, the Fallon Slate International Treasurer candidate, a banker called John Meredith, Philip Poole and some others.
The first Mensa At Cambridge conference at Trinity College in 1980 was a huge success from every point of view except finance, but it had been underwritten by Clive Sinclair and we learned how to do it thanks to his generosity. It was to the theme 'The Eighties' and got glowing reports from the international crowd of Mensans who came, and a lot of press attention and TV time.
The underlying idea of this five day series of lectures in a comfortable and beautiful college was that those who are at the cutting edge in science and philosophy should come together with an international sample of multidisciplinary comprehenders so that in a few days of comfortable, unhurried interaction in holiday atmosphere the Mensans could try to grasp what is happening. Then, in a humble way, they could try to act as an interface between the often out-of-touch mental pioneers at the interface with the unknown, and the general public who may not have the time, leisure, or in some cases the comprehension, to grasp what is changing the world in which they live.
Mensa At Cambridge was again a very good week from every possible point of view. This was a new kind of success which renewed my faith in what we were trying to do. Here was the fundamental concept of a ubiquitous, truly international multi-disciplinary agora come to life. The sour note at the end was a fraught and miserable IGC meeting. In a gloomy windowless room at the back of a Cambridge hotel there was a meeting of Mensans which was not one of minds.
The two factions were more evenly balanced but the Werba faction scraped up enough votes to win on contentious decisions. A vote for his side came from a decision to recognise and accept a proxy vote for a national Mensa in Africa which had about twenty members.
The British AGM that year was at Aston University. As was becoming usual there a long printed agenda with the tedious list of motions from a little group of members giving unbudgeted detailed instructions to the committee. The boring routine of wading through these and rejecting the silly ones caused considerable impatience in the new members but attempts from the floor to short cut proceedings only made them worse. The meeting dragged on contentiously with more procedural motions than discussion and much head-shaking about such meetings of supposedly intelligent people.
After the meeting Clive Sinclair was elected to the Chair of British Mensa. I had been elected as Editor of the British Mensa Newsletter. Clive and I felt that we had to do something to improve that if we were to hold the now rapidly growing membership. It had improved a lot under Ian Redpath but, since it was the only contact most members had with the society, it had to be better and even more professional.
Attendance at meetings was not good because the local group structure had not expanded to cater for the surge of new members coming in as a result of the development drive. After a very successful year I retained the office of Developments Officer. I saw British growth as the only answer available to us, to correct the imbalance that threatened us.
I put much more time into Mensa now that I was retired. Being inhibited from doing much at the international level by the refusal of a second more modest budget at Cambridge I had to throw my weight where I could.
Clive and I wanted to find a way to do something we had never been able to do before. We were good at getting enquiries from free publicity but this was erratic and the staff had to work in surges. We needed a flow of enquiries to fill the gaps. Large-scale advertising had often been considered but had never been thought economic. Later that year we were to try a new adventure. But first back to the international scene.
In November the IGC met in brilliant autumnal Athens and the atmosphere began to improve. The new team seemed to begin to understand each other. A large and representative international group of Mensans met on a hotel roof in the land where democracy was born and in the shadow of the benignly approving white columns of the Acropolis we came to accord. We went carefully through the proposed new International Constitution which Gabe Werba's American sub-committee had produced and we reached agreement. There were things that I did not like but my faction thought that this was the best we could get. We had to take account of the weight of American membership and the very strong determination of this American Committee. The money we used came from all members but it was their treasurer who was signing the cheques for most of it.
There was a strike and some trouble in the streets in Athens at the time so we had to break up in a hurry to get away. Unfortunately we had not dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's on the new draft. Werba was to tidy up some details and we were to pus the whole thing and put it up to a referendum when the final draft was approved. l left Athens with a good feeling, I wanted to see that my thirty-odd years work on Mensa did not come to nothing and so I was interested in arranging succession. I was desperately anxious that the enormous imbalance in membership should be corrected so that we should not become just an offshoot of a largely American organisation.
I was afraid that any emasculation of the IGC would hamper the policy of developing parallel growth in other countries and especially non-anglophone ones. But I thought we could live with the Athens proposals even though they put control largely in the hands of the American Chairman.
1981 started in Britain as another good Mensa year with even faster growth, an enlarged and typeset newsletter and other improvements.
In America too, things went very well with a flattened but continued growth curve peaking at 47,000 members. The March drop in membership had become a bigger problem with so many new members; it was around nine thousand that year.
There were many more meetings and Regional Gatherings in America as the excellent local group structure absorbed the influx of new members into the network. The system of local elections and succession which governs the local chapters there is better at providing for the incoming member than the British Mensa system which has not yet elaborated democratise local structure.
But on the international scene things did not go well. The Athens accord broke down harshly at the next IGC meeting at Baltimore. It was a perfect example of my saying that what ever great minds do, high intelligence thinks unlike. We had two meetings of sincere and dedicated Mensa workers and stalwarts on successive days. All parties were pro Mensa and there were no musketeers or any real self-interest.
The American Committee met under the chairmanship of Gabriel Werba and the International Committee met under my chairmanship and, on an important matter affecting the whole future of Mensa they were poles apart! Such was the Baltimore Disaccord which led to a new bad time for Mensa. We dispersed in serious disagreement. There was disunity as we stood to leave the Mensa table.
Peace in Mensa was to return but not before some undignified scufflings, hard words, numerous proposals for a plethora of referenda and talk of another Boston Tea Party. Not in Boston Massachusetts this time, but in Boston, Lincolnshire, England. Secession in reverse was, for a time, in the air.
The problem was that it had taken some time to tidy up the last details of the agreed Athens Draft International Constitution and the draft had only gone out a few days before the meeting. Some international representatives saw their copy only when they got to Baltimore. There were even new amendments which the American Committee had insisted upon the previous day. There was no great opposition to the draft by the IGC members but they were deeply offended by the high pressure atmosphere in the American meeting (which they attended as observers). There were some hard words and, unwisely, a threat. 'This must be passed tomorrow at the IGC meeting or it will be withdrawn and replaced by something you will like less.'
The American Committee thought that my faction was simply stalling. They insisted that the draft must be passed then and there because they wanted the referendum to happen at the same lime as their own election next June. This would save money. It would also maximise American participation.
Some of the things that were said at the AMC meeting were so anti-international that I had American members apologising on behalf of their committee members. Charlie Fallon stood out as a moderate and a friendly voice in an unfriendly meeting.
So the IGC met next day and was not going to be rushed into a hasty decision on an important matter just so as to help the American Committee to get its votes out. The support for Gabe had faded completely and there was a large majority against an immediate decision in the IGC vote. Gabe Werba was very upset at his failure to carry the IGC and talked of resignation. He did not tum up at the next meeting and sent Henry Schofield Noble in his place. Henry was seen as a hard-liner then.
That we were not stalling is proved by the fact that the Athens proposals were passed nem con after some insignificant editorial amendments a little later that year at the next meeting in Oslo. Even Henry Schofield Noble did not vote against these.
By that time however the American Committee had fulfilled its threat, repudiated the internationally agreed draft and put up another one which was much less acceptable to my faction on the IGC. Among other things the referendum was to dismiss myself and the other elected international officers in mid-term and put what was virtually a controlling block of votes on the new 'International Board of Directors' into the hands of the American Mensa Chairman (so long as the imbalance of membership lasts). Pending the next election the international officers who had been elected by all members were to be replaced by officers appointed by the new board.
When copies of what had unfortunately been represented as a 'punitive' new American draft appeared in Europe there was a 'we can all play that game' feeling and one by one various national Mensas began to put up their own drafts of the International Constitution for referendum as they could do under the existing constitution. They would be withdrawn if the new American one was withdrawn when all would go back to the Athens draft.
After the Oslo meeting we waited to see what would happen at the American AGM at Louisville in June. The news was bad. Relatively few of the 1,200 members present attended the AGM at which only one voice spoke for the internationally agreed Athens/Oslo draft. It was repudiated and a re-elected Werba put the new American draft to the AGM. It was passed to go forward for referendum.
This news caused more National Mensas to put up drafts until there were six altogether. There was much dispute as to how six long complex motions could be put to referendum. If, in the normal way, it were done one at a time in order it would take years and cost a mint. There was no precedent or method for multiple choice. If they all went out at once how could one get a majority of the voters with six to choose from? It was a big mess. And the argument around Mensa became vexed and fraught.
But Irish Mensa was beginning to prosper along with British Mensa and the new leading spirit was David Schulman. In May they held the first of what has become a series of first class international meetings. This was on the occasion of the Irish AG. We all listened eagerly to the American visitors who told us how the grass roots American members were reacting as the quarrel warmed up.
The parties in the constitutional dispute had put their case to the members by various means. The British, the International and the American journals featured articles, discussions, arguments and some none too pleasant personalities on the subject. It was dramatised as a dispute largely between myself and Gabe Werba and someone in America set off a letter-writing campaign. I began to get dozens of letters from America by every post pressing me to accept the American point of view and put the American draft to referendum by itself and out of turn. Others wanted all drafts to go out immediately. I replied to them all, setting out the thing as I saw it, and also began to circulate letters to American local groups.
Feelings were high in Europe and I was seriously afraid of a break-up of Mensa with some of the Europeans breaking away from a Mensa dominated by one national Mensa. It was feared that this would happen if the proposal from the American AGM was passed. The British, Channel Islands, Austrian, and French committees were seriously thinking of a breakaway movement and I had to use my influence against this again and again. At one British committee meeting the decision had almost been made. I was to be late and Clive persuaded the meeting to hear my ideas before the final decision. I managed to hold the fort for unity by a small margin.
The second six day 'Mensa At Cambridge' was another success. It was followed by Ferdinand Heger's similar and splendid weekend meeting at Graz in Austria. The lecturers there were Clive Sinclair, Madsen Pirie and Northcote Parkinson. I met the new activist in Italy, Signor Mennotti Cossu, with good tidings from Rome. These two meetings were in a new class and gave us courage in adversity.
The international situation now looked so bad that a break-up of Mensa seemed unavoidable and it was at this point that I got a call from Hyman Brod, the chairman of Canadian Mensa. Hyman had been a vociferous supporter of the internationalist faction at Baltimore but, like me, he was beginning to fear disunity more than anything else. He proposed that Clive and I should get to an RG of reconciliation with Werba, Noble, Fallon and Gardner, to be held in Miami in October, and this seemed like a good idea to me. But blood was now up and my faction in Europe were against compromise. I was warned that we should be misled and that we should make no concessions.
October in Miami is hot and sunny and there was a very pleasant weekend of swimming and good talk before the big meeting. It did not take too long. Everybody was fed up with a muddled and harmful squabble and there seemed to be no good uncontested solution. We had to make peace. We had to get our knees under the Mensa symbol and talk until we agreed. And Mensa won.
Clive and I argued for some amendments in the features we liked least in the draft. We wanted more American faces on the board rather than a one man block vote with the American chairman deciding everything. That conceded, I was ready to accept my summary dismissal by referendum, taking it as a compliment that this was assumed to be the only way of getting rid of me. Holding on to unity was my priority because it is not easy to get it back once you lose it.
So we signed the Miami pact. It was a personal agreement which had no official standing. All parties were to accept the new draft and all were to use all their influence to get the whole batch of differing drafts withdrawn so that the new, agreed Miami draft could be put to referendum early in 1982. There was no guarantee that all the national committees could be persuaded to withdraw what had in many cases been decided at an AGM but we were pledged to try our very best.
I was in sore trouble when I got back to England, as the negotiator usually is with those who were not there. 'Sell out!', was the cry. Some have not even yet forgiven me for what was seen as a betrayal but I have not the remotest doubt that what Clive and I agreed was the best for the future of Mensa.
And we did it. The Miami signatories managed to convince their supporters to withdraw all drafts so that the Miami draft should be put uncontested. I published an article in December in which I put the case for the agreed draft as the only way to keep Mensa in one piece. 'We can split up anytime, let us give this a try first.' This was the burden of my case.
The outcome was surprising but we were not surprised. Both sides kept their word on the pact and the signatories turned out to be as influential as they had hoped. All the contending drafts were withdrawn and the Miami draft was put to a referendum passed by a very substantial majority. In 1982, after twenty-eight years with a three-year gap of Mensa leadership, I was kicked out in mid-term. The majority of American membership would now exercise control through their committee rather than directly. The control by an array of small National Mensa representatives was peacefully over.
On reflection I can see that, after their own lights, both factions had a case. We could have made the necessary changes more peacefully but, considering that we were scattered around the globe and the parties could not know each other really well, we could have done a lot worse.
As in many such disputes the casus belli seems to me to be more symbolic than real. Two years later we can see that little has really changed. Constitutions and changing them are really distractions from the real problems. Once composed they are hardly ever looked at and so cannot really have much effect on what actually happens.
What happens depends on an astonishingly small group of activists and constitutions neither help nor hinder in finding them. What had happened was that American Mensa activists had begun to insist on the recognition of their success, size and contribution. They were over-impressed by my own influence and felt that a change in the rules was the only way to diminish the influence of a leader who needed to be replaced. I was seen as the classic 'ageing supervisor problem'. Of course no ageing supervisor can be convinced that he is a problem and I am no exception. However, that I was not clinging to office is proved by the fact that I went consenting and that much earlier I had suggested it myself to Fallon. Whether I was right in my guess that I was still young enough in spirit to have more to contribute to my life's work must be judged in the light of what happened then.
All that year I had been working on plans to 'go professional' with the British Mensa newsletter and planning a big advertising campaign for recruitment which the generous Clive Sinclair was prepared to underwrite to the extent that the cost per applicant should be economic. It cost him a lot of money but the experiment taught us a vitally important new technique which has been an overwhelming success. It has led to a five-fold boost in British membership in as many years and has changed the whole Mensa scene radically.
Further, fighting for a better newsletter to hold the great new surge of incoming members I found what seemed to be a good firm of publishers who would try, within our existing budget, to take the newsletter up-market to a properly printed glossy journal.
Clive had to threaten resignation to get this move accepted at a British Committee meeting in Devon. The committee was divided by the new surge of growth and vigour that had started when Clive Sinclair and I came in two years before. The earlier committee members were disturbed by the changes and the up-market moves that had begun. As the chief instigator and motivator of these I was soon, as is any activator, under fire with constant niggling criticisms of the newsletter under my editorship, despite the fact that members generally approved of the improvements.
The idea of 'glossy paper' became the symbol and this was strongly resisted as somehow 'elitist'. I even had campaign-type letters from those who claimed that it would hurt their eyes. Underlying these objections was a suspicion of any change. There was also discomfort at the transformation of the small comfortable Mensa of the under-achievers. There is a strand of this in every Mensa because successful bright people are often too busy in other fields to give voluntary service to Mensa. So far we have not, frankly, been seen by many achievers as a sufficiently worthy cause. But this changed as we spread wider and became more respectable.
Later in 1982 at a meeting in Toronto, the first of the new style International Committee, I was asked by my successor as International Chairman, the successful Canadian businessman Hyman Brock, whether I agreed with the proposed motion to recognise Dr Ware with the self-chosen title fons et origo and whether I would accept the honorary non-executive post of International President of Mensa.
Never averse to a bargain I said yes to both questions and at the formal meeting I was installed as President and Dr Ware was officially recognised as the fount and source of Mensa on the basis of his claim to have suggested the idea to our Founder Roland Berrill.
Dr Isaac Asimov, who had been dismissed also by the referendum, was reinstalled as Vice President. Professor Buckminster Fuller (also dismissed) was installed with the tide President Emeritus.
The same IGC meeting planned for the next meeting to be in Auckland, New Zealand, in pursuance of the dispersed meetings policy.
In Britain my own plans to improve the newsletter in Britain came to fruition when the December edition 'went glossy' with a much enlarged newsletter renamed MENSA, with photo-typeset printing on the eye-scorching glossy paper.
The Toronto IBO meeting had been preceded by the American AG at Trenton, New Jersey, at which there were 750 present. There was a reduced rise in American membership of two thousand to 49,000. The British membership continued to grow more rapidly as the improved publicity methods Harold Gale and I were developing began to work.
The British AG was at the famous Metropole Hotel at Brighton and it marked a very distinct change in image and atmosphere which reminded me of the change at the Chicago meeting when the disruptives had been put in their place by the grass roots members. There was a big crowd of new members at Brighton who took a sturdy negative view of the AGM exhibitionists and dealt in short order with the usual batch of member motions. The fun for the tiny group, who enjoyed the cathartic yearly feast of discord resulting from lots and lots of motions, had been curtailed by the rule passed previously that there had to be ten signatories to an AGM motion. A couple of them scornfully resigned after the meeting and everyone had to adjust to the shock and disappointment of their parting.
Clive Sinclair retained the British Chair despite a challenge and the Gathering, well-organised by Lorraine Boyce, was regarded as an excellent one by all except those whose yearly bout of points of order had been spoiled.
The important news in 1983 lay in the continued resurgence of British Mensa, cessation of growth in America, relative stagnation on the international front, the re-election unopposed for a further two-year term of the international officers appointed by the IBO in Toronto.
The big IGC and IBO meeting in New Zealand was very expensive and this caused some criticism. But publicity was in the Antipodes and the Far East was good because it threw emphasis on Mensa in places remote from our usual sphere. There was another big success with very great publicity for Mensa At Cambridge and an important meeting in Nice of the IBD and IGC.
American Mensa membership just held its ground at 49,000 at the March peak. But Britain had taken over the lead in the most friendly penetration competition.
The new feature in British recruitment was the scheme which resulted from the Sinclair funded experiments with large advertisements. The breakthrough was an absurdly simple idea which I suggested and Harold Gale energetically and successfully worked out and applied.
Large adverts in high circulation journals began to carry a mini IQ test. Those who can solve this are invited to apply. I had learned from the very great response to my own 'kickself' puzzles in the newsletter, that people who have solved a puzzle want to tell somebody.
The most interesting article would attract four letters, a simple 'you will kick yourself when you hear the answer' puzzle and, with the prize of one of my books, would bring in two hundred letters to claim it. The Reader's Digest quizzes worked the same way. The simple lesson I had failed to see was that we could buy the Reader's Digest effect and did not have to wait to be given it. The marginal extra motivation to potential Mensa applicants made all the difference. It pulled us through a threshold to self-financing large adverts. We could now control the flow of applications and fill in the gaps to order.
British Mensa growth took an even sharper upwards surge. In 1983 we passed the 9,000 and the 10,000 mark and I bet John Meredith ten pounds that we should pass the thirteen thousand mark before the AGM in 1984. Some weeks ago in November 1984 I paid him his ten pounds. I had missed by seventeen members.
On 1 July 1983 Professor Buckminster Fuller, who had been the second President of Mensa and was President Emeritus, died.
Not without serious teething troubles the newsletter, restyled MENSA, continued in 1983. Now in December 1984 it has now settled down with a new widely approved, enlarged new format and my recent economies made it possible to afford to have a three colour cover and a professional editor without an increase in the cost per member. We have something that begins to justify the subscriptions of the majority of members for whom we have not yet evolved sufficiently attractive meetings.
My career in Mensa has been like my career in business, successful but stormy. This is because I have the faults of my virtues. I am essentially a self-starter entrepreneur, an ideas man who is plagued by far more new ideas than he can ever implement. Long experienced in dealing with the frustrations of those who sell novelty, I tend to get on and try things. I do not spend as much time engineering consent and agreement as I should. Many beneficial ideas and projects must either go off before they are ready or not at all.
I have also noted that many schemes which have the much vaunted 'careful preparation and detailed planning' take more time, cost more and are less successful than many quickly modified, learn-as-you-go schemes which have a precarious start. The power and freshness of an idea and the enthusiasm it attracts are always diluted by the attempt to be more sure than is needed before the start. The compromises that come with a 'please-everyone' negotiated agreement often ruin the deal.
The problem in 1982 started from my belief that Mensa would in the end greatly benefit internationally from the use of micro-computers to perform the final supervised test. A slow, difficult, demotivating stage would be removed from the induction process and people everywhere could be passed through exactly the same procedure simply and easily in their own home.
So, thinking to prepare the ground and start people thinking by an unofficial persona) initiative, in 1982 I got a micro-computer and learned how to program it.
With help from my family and the permission of my friend, the author Ray Cattell, I wrote a program that would put a candidate through the Cattell IIIA test, supervise it in a standard way and mark the test with due age allowance. This out-of-date test is no longer suitable as a Mensa acceptance (or any other) test because it has been compromised by the fact that Mensa used it for thirty years as a preliminary unsupervised test and sent out millions of copies, not all of which have been returned.
As a start towards the controversial goal of a computer test I arranged to market this as a micro-computer tape. As with my several books on Mensa themes I feel that the authors of such things benefit Mensa by writing them and are entitled to normal royalties as an author. I see no reason why Mensa should claim royalties from the programs written by its unpaid honorary President. I had made no secret of my plan and told those I thought should know. I think perhaps that they had hardly listened or did not believe the unlikely story that, at my age, I was going to be able to write saleable software. So it was only when I had invested much money and time and informed everyone in writing that the tape was on the way that a completely unexpected outcry started against me.
I had a whole year of acrimonious correspondence and was accused of exploiting my position as President for personal gain and ruining the (already ruined) test. Critical letters were sent to psychological associations and Ray Cattell was pestered with Mensa objections.
The matter was referred to the Ombudsman, Eric Hills, and people dropped everything else to send scalding letters around. Eric Hills had many depositions which were very critical and Dr Ware was very critical. Eric Hills listened patiently to all the attacks and then in a long careful report exonerated me and recommended that the matter be forgotten. But there were some members of the new IBD who felt that this judgement was not acceptable and the matter was 'retried' at the meeting in Nice. The IBD meeting there was a bit fraught. My friends Clive, Madsen, John McNulty and some others were indignant at this personal attack and even I, though used to such stuff, felt annoyed that even after I had been kicked upstairs l still was a target for such things. But matters were resolved peaceably with the understanding that the publication should cease after the first batch.
The sad thing is that this time, for once, the idea I was promoting - computerised testing for Mensa - was set back rather than advanced by my experimental personal initiative. I look to the day when the idea can be revived. One thing we have learned is that the fear that the answers could be easily obtained by the computer-wise and that Mensa would be discredited somehow have not been realised. My way of hiding the answers seems to have thwarted anyone who has bothered among the 4,000 or so purchasers. Experience tells me that if anyone had found the answers we should have heard of it in the computer press. (One expert did get to one of the decoy sets of answers that were set as traps.) When, as we must, we get to the stage of a micro-computer Mensa, the answers need not be on the tape or disk.
The Auckland meeting in 1983 was a success and was the biggest meeting ever held in the southern hemisphere. I was gratified by a motion acclaiming what I had done for the British newsletter. This enraged and exasperated the diminishing band of my dogged detractors on the British Committee. (As President I could not stand for the British Committee so I was not a member.)
So we come to 1984. A very sad event was the death after a long and painful illness of Matvin Grosswirth.
American Mensa broke the 50,000 barrier at last as it peaked in March but finished the year with 47,404 members. British Mensa finished the year with 13,139. World membership reached 68,058 by the end of the year.
At the end of this history my aim to correct the membership imbalance is a long way from realised, but the imbalance is slightly less. Over eighty percent of members were from the USA when I was returned as Chairman in 1979. Since then American Mensa has grown fifty percent but the new American total is now sixty-nine percent of all members.
All members, I am sure, especially those from Britain and America, welcome the day when the proportion of Mensa members to the general population is as good in the rest of the world as it is in Britain and America today. In Britain there are 234 members per million of the population against 20,000 per million who are qualified to join. In America there are 209 members per million. I shall draw a veil over Philip Poole's ridiculous performance on the Channel Islands with over a thousand members per million. That is indecent.
Here is a State of Mensa report on the membership of Mensa around the world as I finish this account a few days before Christmas in 1984.
| COUNTRY | DATE OF RETURN | POPULATION IN MILLIONS | CURRENT MEMBERS | MEMBERS PER MILLION |
| Australia | 9/84 | 14.42 | 712 | 49.37 |
| Austria | 10/84 | 7.65 | 466 | 66.91 |
| Belgium | 9/84 | 9.89 | 176 | 17.79 |
| Britain | 12/84 | 56.20 | 13,139 | 233.79 |
| Canada | 6/84 | 25.00 | 2,088 | 83.52 |
| Channel Isl. | 6/84 | 0.13 | 153 | 1,177.00 |
| Finland | 6/84 | 4.76 | 380 | 79.83 |
| France | 10/84 | 53.80 | 425 | 7.89 |
| Japan | 9/84 | 116.12 | 228 | 1.96 |
| Netherlands | 6/84 | 14.03 | 389 | 27.72 |
| New Zealand | 8/84 | 3.15 | 502 | 159.36 |
| Norway/Swed. | 3/84 | 12.34 | 159 | 12.88 |
| Switzerland | 6/84 | 6.55 | 114 | 17.40 |
| USA | 10/84 | 226.50 | 47,404 | 209.28 |
| |
|
|
66,335 | |
| * | * | * | |
|
| Germany | 12/84 | 62.30 | 168 | 2.69 |
| Greece | 12/84 | 9.18 | 23 | 2.50 |
| Hong Kong | 12/84 | 4.60 | 31 | 6.52 |
| Italy | 12/84 | 56.20 | 252 | 4.48 |
| Malaysia | 12/84 | 13.67 | 241 | 17.62 |
| Singapore | 12/84 | 2.31 | 48 | 20.77 |
| South Africa | 12/84 | 27.80 | 289 | 10.39 |
| Spain | 12/84 | 37.80 | 78 | 2.06 |
| Unattached | |
|
603 | |
| WORLD TOTAL | |
|
68,068 | |
The American AG this year was in Washington. It is said to have been a very good meeting.
The British AG was a gain a very well-attended success with an excellent atmosphere except for a messy AGM with the usual small group raising confusing noisy points of disorder and shouting down the Chairman, Clive Sinclair. Apart from this there was just that feeling of a meeting of minds that Jaques Schupbach described in connection with the first few Annual Gatherings which started thirty-seven years before.
There was an excellent international meeting with the IGC and the IBD coming together in Kerkrade, Holland, for a real meeting of minds which made some very sensible decisions.
I was encouraged by both the atmosphere and the press coverage which seemed to me to be positive. The meeting had the same feeling of excitement and the press and TV coverage that the seminal meetings in London had had in 1960 and 1961 which had led to the first big surge in membership. But this was in Europe where we have never had very great success but where always, despite everything, survived.
The Board decided to set up an international office in London and to employ a professional to undertake the job of projecting Mensa firmly and decisively abroad. We have found a promising linguist entrepreneur; we have the money, the will, the knowhow and the resources. Take no bets against us.
I am very hopeful that by the time I revise this on my ninetieth birthday we shall be counting members by the million - in fifty languages.
The last words on this short Mensa history by Mensa's third President are the same as the last recorded words of Mensa's first President: Floreat Mensa.