PERSONAL FILE

sb Stepping up to the honorary presidency of his huge Rank Organisation Ltd., Britain's shrewd Lord Rank, 73, turned over the chairmanship to John Henry Davis, 55. Five years ago, as Rank's deputy in running Britain's biggest film studios and theater chain (507 houses), Davis, a onetime accountant, decided that increased pay and leisure would lure working-class Britons away from the movies to other and costlier forms of entertainment. Accordingly, the Rank Organisation closed or sold 148 theaters and put the proceeds into dance halls, bowling centers, highway restaurants and a new electronics division. While other British moviemakers languish, Rank's profits last year were nearly 300% above 1958. Of the company's $18.5 million gross, 25% came from Davis' new ventures.

sb When natural gas was discovered off the north coast of Japan's main island of Honshu, many engineers doubted that it would ever be possible to pipe it across the island's mountainous volcanic spine to fuel-hungry Tokyo. Last week 5-ft.-tall Shige Kawata, 75, president of the steelmaking Nippon Kokan company, watched the gas start to flow through a 208-mile pipeline that his firm built in less than a year and guarantees to be earthquake-proof. An avid sportsman who is president of the Japan Basketball Association and holds the fifth degree in judo, Kawata argues that a successful businessman must compete not for money but "for love of the game." Since 1951, aggressive competitor Kawata has quadrupled Nippon Kokan's steel production, to 3,255,000 tons a year, and has built the company into a $479 million-a-year giant that ranks third among Japan's steelmakers, fifth among its shipbuilders.

sb Anchored off the wild, desert coast of South West Africa last week, an ungainly craft went about its unlikely work--sucking diamonds, along with tons of silt and rock, from the sea bottom. Barge 77, the world's only floating diamond mine, is the brainchild of Texan Sammy Collins, 48, a stocky, onetime oilfield roustabout who amassed a fortune in the exacting business of laying underwater pipeline. Intrigued by diamonds during an African engineering job, Collins went underseas prospecting in 1961 despite geologists' warnings that he was wasting his time and money, risked $6,000,000 to back his venture. Says Sammy, who still periodically dons a diving suit to check on operations on the bottom: "As long as we pull up 125 carats a day, we're paying our way." Thus far Barge 77 has been averaging 143 carats a day, and in its first two months produced diamonds worth $301,000.

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