NOTE : this paper was delivered at the PDG Conference, Braziers Park, May 2000.
The story begins in 1960. My friend and colleague Eric, a statistician, and I had the habit of arguing about many things, in particular statistics. Eric was enthusiastic about factor analysis and its application to intelligence testing. I was much more critical; I remembered my experiences with research students whose performance fell far short of expectations based on shining results in academic examinations. I felt it unlikely that an hour's test would produce results more significant than a sequence of conventional examinations. One day Eric announced that he had found that a society called Mensa was offering people the opportunity to undergo a recognized intelligence test, and challenged me to take the test.
So, together with twenty-odd other candidates, I found myself on a Saturday afternoon in a small lecture room at the London School of Economics for a supervised IQ test (Cattell III). Not long after the test started a gang of workmen started up with pneumatic drills immediately outside the window and continued for the duration of the test. No-one complained, but all soldiered bravely on.
I had never taken such a test before, but my immediate impression was that the items of the test were designed specifically to favour someone with my own knowledge and educational and professional background, as distinct from testing real intellectual ability. I knew nothing at the time about the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence. It was only after the passage of many years that Mensa added a so-called culture-fair test. So, in spite of the pneumatic drills, in due course I became a member of Mensa.
The membership in 1960 was still quite small, and I recall meetings in pubs and cafés not much different from those that still take place. There were formal meetings and the odd one devoted to a topic like Scientology, which had quite a following among the members. One Mensan I remember at the pub meetings was a tall bearish red-haired individual - the young Clive Sinclair, who gave no indication of his future rise to fame and fortune, his knighthood or chairmanship of British Mensa. I went to several week-end events, some of them the discussion sessions organized by Eric Hills in his inimitable fashion; one at least was at Braziers.
I went to two or three AGMs, but was unable to fathom why they gave rise to so much antagonism and ill-feeling. Unlike political or professional associations, there were never precise issues or principles at stake - the divisions seemed always to be matters of opposing personalities. They were the main reason that I dropped out after three or four years and found other things to do.
So for a number of years I observed Mensa from the outside. In those years Victor Serebriakoff demonstrated extraordinary energy in spreading the gospel, particularly in the USA. The idea of Mensa caught on in the States much more rapidly than in Europe and soon American Mensa dominated the scene. Nevertheless the efforts of Victor, the late Harold Gale, Clive Sinclair (who became chairman of Mensa in 1980) and others resulted in the membership of British Mensa eventually rising to the tens of thousands. Invitations to join Mensa were even published in The Sun.
During the Thatcher era a number of think-tanks devoted to propagating more or less radical versions of conservative thought grew and prospered. One of the most radical was the Adam Smith Institute, founded in 1977 by three former students of St Andrews - Madsen Pirie and Stuart and Eamonn Butler. The ASI (probably incorrectly) was credited with inventing the Poll Tax. Pirie became a member of Mensa and for a number of years was its secretary. He is currently President of ASI.
One of the most extreme examples of radical right activity in the eighties was the Federation of Conservative Students. A number of its former members will appear in our story; others (eg. John Bercow) are now more or less respectable back bench Tory MPs . The scandals associated with the FCS eventually became too much for Conservative Central Office and it was dissolved.
One prominent member of FCS was Simon Clark. He edited a magazine Campus from 1983 which put forward the views of the right wing of the FCS. He was also associated with the Russian émigré group NTS and later became director of the Media Monitoring Unit. The MMU was funded by right-wing business interests and searched for leftist bias in the media, particularly television. Although not a member of Mensa, Clark was appointed editor of the Mensa Magazine and continued as such until quite recently.
By the middle eighties the nominally non-political Mensa was appearing to be dominated by known adherents of the radical right (not least Victor Serebriakoff and Clive Sinclair). This aroused concern among numbers of people unsympathetic to such doctrines. The large and growing membership of Mensa gave it an undeserved appearance of importance.
Encouraged by friends and acquaintances in the media, I re-joined Mensa in 1988 to try to establish what was really going on. Fortunately it was not necessary to take the test again.
The most interesting series of events which I found on re-joining was the 'think-ins' organized regularly and for some time by Victor Serebriakoff. They took place latterly at the Savage Club and had an attendance of up to twenty. Each think-in was addressed by an invited speaker chosen by Victor. The most distinguished speaker I recall was the academic Kenneth Minogue, an exponent of hard-line free market economics. Another speaker was Peter Young, a political advisor of ASI and author of an article 'In Defence of Militarism' published in the Mensa Magazine in 1995. Harry Phibbs, a member of FCS who achieved notoriety by labelling Harold Macmillan as a 'war criminal' also spoke, as did the former MP Peter Bruinvels, an enthusiast for capital punishment who notably volunteered as public hangman if it was re-introduced. The choice of speakers seemed to be confined to those who put forward the doctrines of radical conservatism. There may have been speakers who took a line different from the radical right, but I do not recall one.
In due course the think-ins were replaced by dinners at the National Liberal Club, also organized by Victor. Each dinner was attended by a dozen or so, often the same people. These were black-tie events and took place with due ceremony. Victor would bring along a list of topics for the discussion, which began part of the way through the dinner. He usually acted as chairman, and although the discussion was often dominated by people like Clive Sinclair or Madsen Pirie, dissidents did get a hearing. The talk was usually on a quite friendly level, though I recall a heated disagreement with Clive when I asserted that Robert Maxwell (who had not long before fallen off his yacht) was a thorough crook. The food was fair to good and there was plenty of very satisfactory wine. These dinners went on for several years and ceased shortly before Victor's final illness.
I have to admit that although the 'top people' of Mensa, who under the chairmanship of Clive Sinclair remained in place for a number of years, were almost uniformly politically oriented to the radical right, I have no evidence that they did much to spread their views widely among the Mensa membership. The participants in Victor's think-ins and dinners always formed a small minority. In spite of Simon Clark's political background, he did little to publish much which was at all political (let alone slanted to the right) in the Magazine during his editorship. He was probably aware that the Mensa membership was more interested in, say, the paranormal (as evidenced by the continuing success of Mensa at Malvern) than in politics. One striking aspect of the membership, and at variance with the belief of outsiders, is the sheer unintellectualism of the majority.
Nevertheless the political views of these 'top people' do chime with the political associations of the IQ industry, particularly as evidenced in the USA. There the principal proponents of IQ as an important aspect of human life such as R B Cattell and Arthur Jensen have always been associated with conservative and often racist circles. The book 'The Bell Curve' by Herrnstein and Murray stirred up a political furore in the US, and one of the authors, Charles Murray, came to London in May 2000 to attempt rather unsuccessfully to spread his views on the social consequences of the so-called underclass.
Alan Edmonds
Alan : this is a fascinating account. I hope you or one of our readers will pick up the thread of the last paragraph. In particular, is an interest in promoting IQ as a coherent and important concept necessarily associated with right-wing politics or is it just happenstance that those who have historically promoted the idea have been so oriented?