The first of Rubbra's eleven symphonies occupied him from 1935 until 1937. It was well received, and he soon composed three more, with little other composition intervening. War-service followed, first as an army clerk and later as a pianist helping to keep the forces entertained. Had Rubbra been even a little older he could have been involved in the 1914–18 conflict, and his first four symphonies often seem to show a mind dominated by the apprehension of war so general among sensitive people during the run-up to 1939. The music is, admittedly, quite far removed from the ‘Why, this is Hell, Nor am I out of it’ feeling in the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann's 1939 Concerto Funèbre for violin and strings, written ‘at the scene of the crime’, but the mood is still striking. In ‘Edmund Rubbra, Now 70, Looks at his Eight Symphonies’ (The Listener, 27 May 1971) he wrote, apropos his First Symphony and its immediate predecessors, the successful and quite disturbing Fourth by Vaughan Williams and Walton's First, ‘If there are aggressive factors in all three symphonies it is probably because they all reflect a prevailing atmosphere, for I certainly did not set out to make an aggressive statement.’

Rubbra, along with most other fine traditionalist composers, had without renouncing the forms of the past found ways in which they could serve current needs. As he said in BCI, ‘the forms that have developed in the history of Western music, although few in number, have no fixed shapes that can be measured and made available, like moulds for a jelly.