In the liner notes to the 1985 recording of the composer's 1st and 2nd string quartets, his friend George Dannatt wrote that the work had been completed in 1914, leading many to believe the piece was a wartime composition.

Following this the composer made arrangements for the work to be published by Stainer & Bell as his Opus 4 with a dedication to Edward Dent, one of his tutors at Cambridge.

[6] The latter performance was attended by Lady Elgar, who wrote to the composer expressing her liking of the work's "eager life and exhilarating energy and hope".

[8] Ellis identified the most likely influences on the work as being Elgar, Vaughan Williams and French composers such as Ravel.

Ellis attributes the work's "Classical simplicity" to either the influence of his teachers at Cambridge, Charles Wood and Edward Dent, the quartet's eventual dedicatee, a noted expert on Mozart, or simply to the composer's inexperience at this stage in his development.