Dr Lancelot Ware, who died on August 15th aged 85, was credited with conceiving and setting up Mensa, the contentious organisation for people with high IQs. But there are those who insist the idea was already well advanced in the mind of Roland Berrill when the two met by accident on a train in the mid-1940s.
That first contact says something about the mindset of some Mensa buffs. Lancelot Ware, a postgraduate Oxford student, was going home on holidays and was reading a volume of Hansard. Roland Berrill, a 50-year-old Australian, who had a private fortune, but had failed to get into Oxford, watched him reading. After a while he could keep silent no more: "Young man, is that Hansard you are reading?" asked the super-intelligent Roland Berrill. "Obviously," replied the super-intelligent Lancelot Ware. "You can see the name at the top." And he went on reading.
Critics of Mensa might see, in that brief conversation, the essence of many of the organisation's future problems - the clumsy attempt at human contact brushed off gracelessly by an assertion of superior cleverness. But both men, it turned out, were more interested in organising the cerebrally clever than the astute or emotionally literate: before the train reached its destination, Roland Berrill had told Lancelot Ware about his failure to get into Oxford; about his efforts to form a movement to persuade men to wear brighter coloured clothes, and, in particular, about his passion for intelligence testing.
A lawyer by training, Roland Berrill was, at this stage, chiefly interested in measuring intelligence by phrenology, the study of bumps and recesses on the head. Lancelot Ware argued that intelligence tests were a more scientific way forward. He had made such tests as a medical researcher during the war, and had been influenced by the work of Sir Cyril Burt, who had concluded that intelligence might have a racial basis. (Burt became a hate figure of the left and was exposed as a faker.) Before they parted, he had invited Roland Berrill to Oxford to discuss their ideas further.
The fact that Lancelot Ware gave Roland Berrill some intelligence tests at his lodgings - and pronounced his new friend to be in the top 1 per cent of those he had examined - perhaps indicated he was not as unworldly as he may have appeared. Roland Berrill reportedly burst into tears, sobbing that it was the first time anyone had ever pronounced him good at anything.
Soon, Roland Berrill's coffers, as well as his tear ducts, were opened. Their baby, Mensa, was born in 1946, its aim being to assess people's high intelligence and inquire into what things such people had in common.
Whatever the truth about the balance of influence between the two men, it is certain Lancelot Ware was a co-founder. He remained an idiosyncratic figure, often at odds with the organisation, and whose interest in it waxed and waned, according to whether he agreed with its leadership or not. Victor Serebriakoff, an international honorary president of Mensa, remembered asking everyone at one meeting to define themselves in terms of class. The only hand that went up for the upper-class call was Lancelot Ware's.
Victor Serebriakoff reflected: "Personally, I think that he and Berrill felt they had formed Mensa to re-justify the aristocracy, but when they looked at the members coming in, it didn't turn out to be like that at all."
Lancelot Ware's faith was more long-lasting, though periodically dented by officers he did not agree with. As early as the 1950s, when Mensa had only 150 members - and Roland Berrill pulled out, disillusioned and dying shortly afterwards - Lancelot Ware left as well. But he rejoined in the 1960s and helped British Mensa, the forerunner of branches in many countries, to expand into a membership of thousands.
After Steyning Grammar School and the Royal College of Science, where he got his BSc and PhD, and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he got an MA, Lancelot Ware became a lecturer in biochemistry at St Thomas's Hospital medical school from 1941 to 1946. He was called to the Bar in 1949, specialising, until his retirement in 1987, in cases involving international trademarks and intellectual property.
At one time, he was chairman of the Conservative Graduate Association, and a governor of Imperial College, the London School of Economics, St Olave's and St Saviour's Foundation, Wye Agricultural College and Weybridge Technical College. From 1949 to 1955, he was a Surrey county councillor, after which he became a London County Council alderman until 1961. His hobbies were field sports, real tennis, rackets and chess, and he was made an OBE in 1987. When he was 65, he married Joan Francesca Rae, who survives him.
As if to clinch the Mensa question, in 1967, on the organisation's 30th anniversary, a commemorative plaque was unveiled outside Lancelot Ware's former lodgings in Oxford. In 1982, he was declared the official fons et origo Mensae.
Dr Lancelot Lionel Ware: born 1915; died, August 2000