William Reed was born in Hunslet, Leeds, on 29^th September 1892, but was baptised in All Saints’ Church, Barwick in November the same year. He was oldest of the three surviving of the five children between Alfred Reed, a hay and straw dealer, and his wife, Annie Louisa. The family lived on Potterton Lane, in Barwick.

After he had left school, William reed began working with his father in the hay business, but by the time of his marriage, he had moved to Briggate (later renamed Main Street) in Garforth, and was in business for himself as a cab proprietor.

On 15^th April 1915, William Reed married Gladys Mary Eaton, of Barwick, who was five years his senior, and the daughter of Robert Eaton, a retired Civil Servant.

William Reed volunteered for the Army under the Group System devised by the Director General of Recruiting, the Earl of Derby. The system quickly became known as the ‘Debry Scheme’ and it was designed to regulate the flow of voluntary recruits into the army which had begun to fluctuate and drop off from the what it had been at the beginning of the war and for its first few months. Another aim of the scheme was to eliminate the recruitment of underage boys who lied about their age to join up.

The battery immediately took over positions at Herbécourt, west of Péronne in Picardy, and stayed in this area for two months before moving north to positions at St Aubin, near Arras. For the remainder of the war the battery occupied numerous positions near Arras, with a period spent in early 1918 in Belgian Flanders near Poperinge.

251^st Siege Battery was equipped with 4 x 6-inch Howitzers, and each gun took ten men to manage it. The model of 6-inch howitzer that the British Army took to war in 1914 was already obsolete, and it was necessary to design a lighter, more manoeuvrable, more powerful, longer ranged gun with which to replace it. The 26cwt gun that was developed was a very stable and reliable gun and stayed in service until after the Second World War.

Tragedy was to visit the Reed family once more before 1918 came to an end. The Influenza Pandemic was sweeping the world, and in the space of a few months had killed more people than had died as a result of the war. William and Gladys’ son, the two year old Colin Eaton Reed died of the ‘flu, and was buried in Barwick Churchyard, with his mother, on 28^th November 1918, just as the world was coming to terms with the end of the war.

William Reed is also commemorated on the war memorial inside St Mary’s Church in Garforth, although his unit is wrongly recorded as 25^th Siege Battery, and in 2018 a new memorial was commissioned which now stands outside in the cemetery.