Ray Kane was born in Ireland. He was in the South African Police when Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island in 1964.
In 1965, while hitch-hiking through Tanzania en route from Durban to England, he crossed the path which Che Guevara and his Cuban Brigade would take later into the Congo. The idea for this book was born of those two events. Suspected of being a mercenary, he was deported by the Sudanese government from Juba into Uganda, from where he hitch-hiked through Kenya to Mombassa. The Braemar Castle, en route from Cape Town to London, was in port. Fortunately, a crew member had broken a leg and was being returned to South Africa; Kane was taken on as a replacement steward and worked his passage to Tilbury (London) docks.
He was commissioned into the British Army in 1965 and into the Omani Army in 1968. He served for two years as Red Company commander, Desert Regiment, in the Dhofar War, and led the palace assault group which captured Sultan Said bin Taimur on 23 July 1970, in the coup d’état which started Oman’s renaissance, and in which Kane was wounded.
He was “sacked on-the-spot”, and quite rightly too, in Kane’s opinion, by Colonel Mike “Oddjob” Harvey in 1972, after playfully shooting-up the RAF Salalah (Dhofar) Officers’ Mess and its open-air cinema.
Before founding his security equipment company Kane worked as, among other things, a meat porter (humper) and was the Transport and General Workers’ Union Shop Steward for the night-shift.
Ray Kane is divorced and has five children.