Henry Reed (22 February 1914 – 8 December 1986) was a British poet, translator, radio dramatist, and journalist.
Although he had studied French and Italian at university and taught himself Greek at school, Reed did not take to Japanese, perhaps because he had learned an almost entirely military vocabulary.
Walter Allen, in his autobiography As I Walked down New Grub Street, said Reed intended "to devote every day for the rest of his life to forgetting another word of Japanese.
"[1] After the war he worked for the BBC as a radio broadcaster, translator and playwright, where his most memorable set of productions was the Hilda Tablet series in the 1950s, produced by Douglas Cleverdon.
The series started with A Very Great Man Indeed, which purported to be a documentary about the research for a biography of a dead poet and novelist called Richard Shewin.