Mensa at 80: It Was Meant to Be 600 Advisers to Governments

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Oct. 1, 2026 (Thu.)

MiscellanyOct. 1, 2026

Mensa at 80: It Was Meant to Be 600 People Advising Governments

Co-founder Roland Berrill set one condition at the door: a test score

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In Three Lines

  1. Mensa, founded in Oxford 80 years ago today, was first planned as a secret circle of 600 people who would advise governments.
  2. Co-founder Roland Berrill screened applicants by a single test score, and a score says nothing about what a person wants to do.
  3. The members did not betray Berrill. He built the door, and the people who came through it made the Mensa we know.

Many people first meet Mensa in a puzzle book. The name sits on the cover of brain teasers in bookstores. That is a fair picture of the society today: clever people working on hard problems and enjoying it.

Mensa turns 80 today. On Oct. 1, 1946, in Oxford, England, co-founder Roland Berrill had the society's first leaflet printed, and Mensa still counts that day as its birthday. Puzzles were not part of his plan.

A conversation on a train

In August 1945, two strangers sat across from each other on a train in Surrey, England. Berrill, born in Australia, was qualified in law but lived off his investments. He noticed that the man opposite was reading Hansard, the official record of Parliament, and started talking. The man was Lancelot Ware, 30, a scientist who was now studying law at Oxford.

They exchanged addresses and parted. On March 11, 1946, they met again, and Ware suggested Berrill try the Cattell intelligence test. Berrill scored in the top 1 percent. At that meeting they began planning a club for high scorers. Who thought of it first was once disputed; Ware was later recognized as the source of the idea. Berrill, though, put up the money, wrote the early pamphlets and became the first secretary.

A ceiling of 600

Berrill's society looked nothing like today's. Mensa International says so in its own press materials. The founders pictured a secret, highly elite think tank that would advise governments and so shape world events. It would have a fairly autocratic leadership, and membership would stop at 600.

600
The membership cap Mensa's founders originally had in mind

Berrill is said to have seen it as an aristocracy of the intellect. It is easy to see the appeal. On the train, the two men had discussed a radio broadcast by the psychologist Cyril Burt, who had suggested gathering highly intelligent people to work on the problems left by the war. People still say something similar whenever politics disappoints them.

One question at the door

The trouble was the entrance. Berrill set one requirement: a high score on an intelligence test. He did not ask about family, profession or politics. The name is Latin for "table," and Mensa today describes itself as a round-table society where background does not matter.

Think of a coach who builds a basketball team by measuring height. He will certainly get tall players. Height will not tell him which of them want to play basketball. Some will want volleyball, and some will just want somewhere to hang out.

A test score works the same way. It does not ask whether someone wants to advise a prime minister. Berrill also recruited through unsupervised tests that applicants took on their own. By that route he gathered about 400 members.

Berrill walked away in four years

The 400 did not follow his script. Victor Serebriakoff, who later rebuilt Mensa and became its international president, wrote that Berrill grew deeply unhappy with how members answered a peculiar letter he sent them. In 1950 he resigned as secretary. Ware left around the same time, having disagreed with how Berrill ran things.

The society nearly faded away. When Serebriakoff took over as secretary, he recalled, about 100 members remained, with roughly £56 in the kitty. Other members remember an annual meeting in 1954 that drew four people, Serebriakoff and his wife among them. The membership records from those years are lost, so no one knows the true count.

It is tempting to say Berrill simply recruited the wrong people. That does not hold up. He chose them by exactly the standard he had set. The standard measured one thing, and only one.

Still one condition at the door

Serebriakoff formed a committee and put the testing in order. Today Mensa admits anyone who scores in the top 2 percent on an approved, properly supervised intelligence test. The door still asks for one thing only, as it did in 1946.

What changed was the mission. Mensa now describes its purposes as identifying and fostering human intelligence, encouraging research into intelligence, and offering members a stimulating intellectual and social life. Advising governments is not on the list. The society says it takes no position on politics, religion or social issues.

After that, the society grew. Mensa International now counts about 150,000 members in more than 90 countries, roughly 250 times the cap Berrill had planned. Members wrote or tested some of those puzzle books.

Berrill assumed that gathering clever people would give him the society he wanted. The only thing he asked at the door was a score. A team picked by height can always choose volleyball. The society was his only as far as the door.

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