He was natural around Birmingham and educated at a local grammar school, followed by Birmingham University. At university he associated with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Walter Allen. He went in to learn for an MA so worked as a teacher & journalist. He was known as as much as a Army within 1941, spending virtually all of the war as a Japanese translator.

Fallowing a war he worked for the BBC as a radio broadcaster and dramatist, in which his virtually all memorable placed of productions was a Hilda Tablet series in the Fifties. The series began by owning A super swell human indeed, which purported to become the infotainment just about the the food and drug administration for the life history of a dead poet known as Richard Shewin. But, a 'twelve-tone composeress' Hilda Tablet, a friend of a late Richard Shewin, became a virtually all interesting character in the play & in the next play, she persuades the biographer to vary the subject of the life story to her - telling him "not more than twelve volumes". Dame Hilda, when she late became, was depending partially in Ethel Smyth and partly in Elisabeth Lutyens (who was non supprised, & considered legal action).

His best known verse form is Appellative of Area, the witty parody of army basic expert training videos. Promulgated around The Map of Verona in 1946, it was his sole collection to exist as published within his life-time. An additional anthologised verse form is Chard Whitlow, the clever sarcasm of T.S.Eliot's Burnt Norton.

Alas for Reed he was forever existence confused by owning a tremendously better known Sir Herbert Read; Reed retaliated by naming his alter ego biographer in the Hilda Tablet plays "Herbert Reeve" so by with everyone else make their way a title slightly wrong.