He saw service with the 6th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles at the battle of Chunuk Bair in Gallipoli, the Balkans and the Middle East.

At Chunuk Bair his regiment were "battle virgins when they were thrown into the Turkish machine gun fire for the first time on 10 August 1915".

Several stragglers and those who had lost their way returned to base in the hours that lay ahead but by the evening of 10 August the Hampshires and the Rifles had been broken in what amounted to a cruel massacre".

'"[5] Returning from World War I Hurst found life in Belfast constraining and he took a government grant to emigrate to Canada sometime in 1920.

Hurst's visuals are invariably compared with those of his mentor, John Ford and the opening shots of Riders... are markedly Fordian in their elementary quality".

[7] Hurst's earliest English films include The Tell-Tale Heart (1934), The Tenth Man (1936) and Glamorous Night (1937).

Released in December 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War and set in Newcastle upon Tyne, it charts the slow moral destruction of a barber following his theft of some money.

With its sustained doom-laden atmosphere, Krampf’s expressive cinematography, its adroit mixture of location shooting and Gothic compositions and Ralph Richardson's wonderful performance as a lower middle class Everyman, 'On the Night of the Fire' clearly shows that an achieved mastery of film noir existed in British cinema."

Hurst said, "The film is my favourite because of the wonderful experience of working with soldiers and because it is a true documentary reconstruction of the event.

"The combination of an A list cast, the portrayal of the iron reliance of the Maltese people, the gallantry of the RAF pilots and a tragic love story were the four components of its success".

In 1962, in his late 60s, Hurst returned to John Millington Synge and adapted the script and produced and directed The Playboy of the Western World, his last film.

Hurst gave early film roles to Richard Attenborough, Roger Moore and Vanessa Redgrave.

The first four scriptwriting roles of later Bond director Terence Young were on the Hurst directed films On the Night of the Fire (1939), A Call For Arms (1940),Dangerous Moonlight (1941) and A Letter From Ulster (1942).

[18] On the same date the Ulster History Circle unveiled a blue plaque at Hurst's birthplace, 23 Ribble Street, East Belfast.

On 6 August 2011, RTÉ Radio One's Documentary on One series broadcast An Irishman Chained to the Truth, a 40-minute programme about Hurst.

[24] The Human Blarney Stone: The Life and Films of Brian Desmond Hurst (2011) documentary was included as an extra on several US releases of Scrooge from VCI.