In the 1950s he spent time working on a farm in Morvern in the Highlands of Scotland,[3] and became a missionary in Canada before becoming involved in diamond prospecting, which he also pursued in South America.
[4][5] In 1968, under the pseudonym Donald Cameron, he published the ostensibly autobiographical The Field of Sighing, describing a childhood in Ardnamurchan, and Sons of El Dorado, set in Venezuela.
"[7] In April 1990, Bryans publicly stated in the Dublin-based magazine Now that Lord Mountbatten, Anthony Blunt, and others were involved in an old-boy network which held gay orgies in country houses and castles on both sides of the Irish border, as well as at the Kincora Boys' Home.
John Costello, the author of Mask of Treachery, a study of the Soviet Cambridge spy ring, wrote: "Bizarre though some of Harbinson's [Bryans] theories may be, those that could be checked mesh with an established record.
[13] As Robert Harbinson, he wrote Tattoo Lily And Other Ulster Stories (1961), The Far World (1962), the novel Lucio (1964) and a collection of poems, Songs Out Of Oriel.
They are barely of the same genre...Bryans is most effective in linking together, in unexpected ways, apparently unconnected worlds; the back streets of Belfast and the big houses of Fermanagh; evangelical fellowship and the intelligence services, homosexuality and religion.