Hello and thank you for downloading our history program witness on the BBC World Service with me Rachel Gilman.

Today I'm taking you back to 1946 and the founding of Mensa, the Society for People with Exceptional Intelligence.

I've been speaking to Menza's archivist Ian Fergus.

He says the world's oldest high-key society came about because of a

chance encounter.

It was actually a train journey to Godalming in Surrey just after the Second World War and there were two men who met on the train.

There was an older man in Australian, Roland Burrell and he got into a conversation

with the younger man, Lancelot Ware, by asking him if he was reading Hansard, the parliamentary magazine if you wish.

The cut reply was obviously, because the title on the front is pretty open like that,

but a conversation developed. Intelligence tests were discussed, business cards were swapped.

Roland Burrell sent a letter to Lance Ware, inviting him to his lodgings in Oxford to discuss Lancelot's idea of starting a high IQ club.

A high IQ club.

IQ tests had been growing in popularity since the beginning of the 20th century.

Beryl, a barrister, and Ware a biochemist, were both interested in ways of testing cleverness.

Back in 1939, Lancelot had been interested in intelligence testing while doing medical research,

and had tested his sister Elaine, as well as friends and relatives to prove to himself

that there was a good correlation between his estimates of their abilities and their IQs.

Having met on the train, the men soon discovered that they both admired a prominent British psychologist, Sir Cyril Bert, who used a system known as the Kattel scale to test intelligence.

Both men had heard radio broadcasts back in 1945 by Sir Cyril Bert, who actually became the first president of Mensa and of his studies of

psychology and intelligence testing. So Cyril had already organized a high IQ club

at University College London with the entrance requirement of the club being an IQ of 155 on the

cartel scale. That's equivalent to the top 1% of the people. So several notice that

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