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Early Monday morning, Arthur busses Nell roundly and climbs into the back seat of a large Austin to be driven to London for the week. As the car heads down the lane, Rank hangs out the window, waving and blowing kisses to Nell. After a few minutes of this, the lane makes a sharp left turn. Rank then scrambles across the car, rolls down the other window and waves until Nell is out of sight. Then he pops back on the seat, opens his ever-present and bulging briefcases, and begins the day's work.
Boy Loses Fortune. Such frivolities would no doubt have stirred the lightnings in Arthur's father, terrible-tempered "Holy Joe" Rank. A onetime mill hand, he modernized milling methods in Britain and made a fortune. From him, Arthur inherited mills and millions, Methodism and his whole-wheat character. Holy Joe was a complete bear, even in his dealings with heaven. "When I take a thing to prayer," he would bellow, "I always succeed." And with mere men he was twice as grizzly. He refused to install elevators in his office buildings: the workers might get soft and lazy.
Long before Holy Joe died in 1943 (at 89) he cannily transferred to his children (except Rowland, who drank, and had already died "by the will of God") millions of pounds worth of stocks and mills. He left a taxable estate of only £70,000.
Arthur was Holy Joe's third and favorite son. He quit school at 17 (he still misspells simple words) and went to work in his father's offices as a 10-shilling-a-week junior clerk. In World War I he rose to a sergeancy in a field ambulance unit in France. When he came home, father gave him the cash to buy Peterkin's Self-raising Flour Mill, just to see what the boy could do. Arthur showed him: the story goes that he lost £1,000,000. But Rank insists that he saved his skin by selling Peterkin for what he invested.
Then Arthur settled down. He married Millionheiress Laura Ellen (Nell) Marshall, daughter of Lord Marshall of Chipstead, onetime Lord Mayor of London. With brother James, Arthur learned how to steer his father's industrial machine. While James took time off to race horses, Arthur stuck to the grind of milling and selling 30% of all the flour consumed in Britain. Then in 1934 he got what seemed like a daft idea. He decided to go into the movie business.
There was Methodism in this madness. He bankrolled the Religious Film Society, a small Methodist film-making group. In 1935, Rank helped finance the production of The Turn of the Tide, a documentary film about the Yorkshire fishing villages. It won third place at the International Film Exhibit in Venice. Rank was shocked to find that Britain's big movie distributors were not interested in showing his prize. To make certain that people saw it, Arthur had to buy the Leicester Square Theater in London. In this small way, the renaissance of the British cinema began.