[3] Privately educated, Tebb started work at fifteen for a Manchester business, attending evening classes where he encountered the ideas of the British radicals John Bright, Richard Cobden and Robert Owen, and the American Christian social reformer Adin Ballou.

He was introduced to Ballou and made frequent visits to the latter's experimental Hopedale Community, where he met and married Mary Elizabeth Scott on 4 December 1856.

Tebb became a director of a company making bleaching chemicals for paper, earning a large fortune that he used to fund a variety of social causes.

In 1895, he moved to Rede Hall, Burstow, Surrey, where he occupied major posts in the parish council, local horticultural society and cricket club.

He paid for a monument to Adin Ballou at Hopedale, and a drinking fountain in Burstow in memory of the 400,000 horses killed and wounded during the Boer War, to which he was strongly opposed as a pacifist and anti-imperialist.

[6] His daughter, Florence Joy Tebb (1858–1936), studied mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge and worked closely with her husband the biologist Raphael Weldon.