Lancelot Ware; Co-Founder of Mensa

Lancelot Ware, 81, co-founder of Mensa, the organization for people with high IQs. Mensa was the result of a chance meeting on a train in 1945 between Ware, then a postgraduate student at Oxford, and Australian Roland Berrill. A year later, they formed the High IQ Club. They declared their aim was to establish a list of “600 of the most intelligent people in the country,” to be made available to academics and government departments in Britain. Mensa, which is open to people who score in the top 2% on an intelligence test, says it has 100,000 members worldwide. Ware, who dropped out of Mensa in 1950 but rejoined the group after the death of Berrill several years later, was born in Mitcham, Surrey. Educated at Lincoln College, Oxford and the Royal College of Science, Ware became a barrister in 1949 and specialized in trademark and intellectual property law. On Tuesday in London.