Becoming an Actress

‘I come from North Wales … But I suppose I'm really a cockney’, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies declared in an interview during the early part of her career in 1917. While she was born in London, her parents had met in North Wales, where her father lived in Bethesda, Caernarvonshire. David Davies, who had taken the name Ffrangcon after a local valley, returned to the area after graduating from Oxford to work as a priest. He had local renown as a singer, and after moving to London to work in Hoxton, he eventually resigned his curacy to concentrate on his musical career. Her mother, Annie ‘Nan’ Raynor, was the daughter of a Manchester doctor who had a holiday cottage in North Wales. After their marriage in 1890, the couple had honeymooned at the house of the renowned Welsh singer Clara Novello Davies, from whom David Ffrangcon-Davies was to secure assistance in his early career. Ffrangcon-Davies was born in 1891, the first of three children; her younger siblings were Marjorie (b. 1893) and Geoffrey (b. 1895). The family initially lived in Finchley Road, but as Ffrangcon's career flourished they moved to Berlin in 1898, from where he undertook long concert tours around Europe and America. In 1901 the family returned to London, living near fashionable Regent's Park, where Ffrangcon was to sing the lead in The Dream of Gerontius, which Elgar had written for him.