Charles Edmund Rubbra was born on 23 May 1901, at 57 Cambridge Road, a simple ‘two up, two down’ house in a poor area of Northampton. The town would also be the birthplace, four years later, of William Alwyn, and in 1921 of Malcolm Arnold. Those opening years of the new century produced a fine crop of future English composers: Alan Bush was born in 1900, Rubbra's later best friend Gerald Finzi likewise in 1901, William Walton in 1902, Lennox Berkeley in 1903, Alwyn, Constant Lambert, Alan Rawsthorne and Michael Tippett in 1905, with Arnold Cooke, Benjamin Frankel and Elisabeth Lutyens following in 1906. The family soon moved to 2 Balfour Road, near open fields which, in his biographical recollections up to the age of about twenty, he said meant a lot to him, and which he missed after a further move in his early teens.

Rubbra started life with few advantages save his talent, though one must never underrate the influence of parents with ‘an untutored love of music’, in particular a mother who had a fine singing voice and a lot of energy. As he grew up, he not only learned piano parts in order to accompany her, but wrote out transpositions to suit the compass of her voice. His father, also named Edmund, had been trained as a watch and clock repairer and had a particular skill at mending musical boxes.