The extended families of each of his parents provided a financial, intellectual and cultural framework that established an unusually privileged and creatively fertile environment into which Ernest John Smeed Moeran was born on 31 December 1894 and within which he was brought up. Intellectual stimulus was provided both by the Trinity College and Cambridge educated relatives on his father's side and by the artistic members of his mother's family. Moreover, the musicians in both ancestries would suggest that music was an important aspect of Moeran home life. Together, these factors show that Moeran grew up surrounded by a very advantaged and influencing family. However, his father seems to have been unsettled professionally, transferring every few years from one living to another throughout the south of England. After his marriage, the Reverend Joseph William Wright Moeran remained as senior curate at St Paul’s, Upper Norwood for seven years until 1893, when he was appointed vicar of St Mary’s, Spring Grove in Middlesex. In 1898, he was appointed vicar of St Mary Magdalene, Peckham, and the family moved to nearby Camberwell. Joseph William remained there until 1901, when he became vicar of St Simon's Southsea, near Portsmouth. This incumbency lasted until 1905, when he was installed as vicar of the joint parishes of Salhouse with Wroxham in the county of Norfolk. This was some twenty miles from Bacton, on the Norfolk coast, where Joseph William's father, the Reverend Thomas Warner Moeran, had been vicar since 1873. Joseph William had spent his late childhood years living in Bacton, so it was a part of the country that he knew well. The changeable domestic life that would surely have been the consequence of regular relocations would later find reflection in Moeran's adult life as an inability to settle anywhere for an extended time.

While the Elementary Education Acts of 1870 and 1880 had provided for universal schooling for all children in England between the ages of five and twelve, including compulsory attendance at a suitable school if one was available, exceptions to actual attendance were allowed in cases where the child could be shown to be receiving an equivalent education elsewhere.