Born at 20 College Crescent, South Hampstead, NW on 24 July 1905 the younger child of Henry Wilkes Gibson, MRCS a general medical practitioner, and Jane Grant, his wife. He was educated at Rugby School and matriculated from University College, Oxford in October 1923. At Oxford he gained the Theodore Williams prize in anatomy and was elected an honorary scholar of his college in 1925. He graduated BA with a second class in the honours school of physiology in 1926 and then became a medical student at St Thomas's Hospital, London. Whilst acting as house surgeon he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis, but was accepted for a commission in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Progress of the disease prevented him from serving, and he died unmarried at St Nicholas Hospital, Pyrford, Surrey on 18 October 1935, aged 30.