The outbreak of war on 4 August 1914 and the publication of Stanford's autobiography, Pages from an Unwritten Diary, marked an important watershed in his life. The autobiography in many ways tacitly acknowledged that his career and position as one of Britain's foremost composers now no longer existed. Nevertheless, one of the book's many purposes was to record for posterity the author's role in the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ at a time when, Stanford sensed, Britain's new musical confidence in the music of Elgar, Delius, Grainger and Vaughan Williams appeared to turn its back on its late nineteenth-century heritage, a heritage Stanford was at pains to point out, enjoyed the pedigree of his communion with the continental giants. Pages from an Unwritten Diary also summarised most of Stanford's perennial campaigns and protests – his case for English church music, a national opera, a proper ethic for music publishing and the need for a proper musical infrastructure through state subvention – but the book also devoted many pages to his Irish background, the aim of which was not only to indulge in nostalgia, but to lay emphasis on a ‘golden age’ of Anglo-Irishmen who had enriched the British Empire in all walks of professional life. Stanford wanted to be part of this ‘brilliant’ generation whose power and influence he knew was about to disappear.

The action of the German Army and the Kaiser was a source of disbelief and exasperation to Stanford. To him, Germany had become artistically decadent, a predicament he blamed on unification in 1870 and the centralising of power in Berlin: