Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies's career was well established by the inter-war period, and she was able to enjoy playing a wide range of roles. However, this had not always been the case, and the early days of her career were characterized by struggle for recognition and the limitations of typecasting. During the First World War, when acting work became difficult to secure, she had ‘existed on making hats as a trade, and an occasional concert engagement’, and she also utilized her fluent German to translate for the War Office. Despite her thespian ambitions, it was her musical career, boosted by a claim to family tradition, which was to revitalize her theatrical ambitions after the war. Her father David Ffrangcon Davies's reputation as a baritone for whom Elgar had written roles conferred high status in musical circles, although illness had ended his career abruptly in 1907, before his daughter's acting debut. He died before the end of the war in 1918, and his reputation and contacts were to prove vital to the development of his daughter's career. The composer Rutland Boughton had found his first employment in 1903 as accompanist to David Ffrangcon-Davies and had lodged with the family. Boughton was a left-wing intellectual who shared aims with the Arts and Crafts movement, rejecting commercial theatre and advocating the dissemination of the arts as a force for social good.