Pelmanism was a system of brain training which was popular in the United Kingdom during the first half of the twentieth century.
Originally devised as a memory system in the 1890s by William Joseph Ennever, the system was taught via correspondence from the Pelman Institute in London (named after Christopher Louis Pelman).
It was developed to expand "Mental Powers in every direction" and "remove those tendencies to indolence and inefficiency".
[1] One of the techniques taught as late as the 1950s in Britain was the Method of loci, recorded since ancient Roman rhetoric, to remember 20 or 100 items in order, keyed to a particular house or geographic route familiar to the student.
Asquith, Sir Robert Baden-Powell (founder of the Boy Scout movement), novelist Sir Rider Haggard, playwright Jerome K. Jerome and composer Dame Ethel Smyth as well as thousands of other Britons.