His father was a dentist, and he was baptized as Cecil William Henry into the Church of England on 12 November 1905, when his date of birth was noted as 27 September 1905.

[4] At 07:15 on the morning of 11 July 1936, Captain Bebb took off from Croydon Airport, London, in a Dragon Rapide aircraft, with a navigator, his friend Major Hugh Pollard, and two female companions.

Bebb and Franco arrived in Tetuán on 19 July and the general quickly set about organising Moroccan troops to participate in the coming coup.

[6] The flight itself was planned over lunch at Simpson's in the Strand, where Douglas Francis Jerrold, the conservative Roman Catholic editor of the English Review, met with the journalist Luis Bolín, London correspondent of the ABC Newspaper and later Franco's senior press advisor.

He was also a test pilot at A W Hawkesley Limited (a Hawker Siddeley subsidiary based at Brockworth, Gloucesteshire)[9] In 1946, after the war, he returned to Olley Air Service Ltd.[3] He continued his work in commercial aviation into the 1960s.