- Gibbs was born and raised in The Vineyards, a Georgian mansion in Great Baddow. The mansion was demolished in 1965, and replaced by an apartment building called Marrable House, which lasted until its demolition in 2016.
- Queen Elizabeth II requested Gibbs's work "The Dusk Waltz" to be performed on her 18th birthday, in 1944.
- Gibbs married at All Saints' Church in Notting Hill, London, England.
- Gibbs hated his first name, Cecil, so he went professionally by "Armstrong Gibbs".
- Gibbs' son, David Michael Hamilton Gibbs (1919-1943), was a Captain in the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines unit of the Essex Regiment; David was killed in action while fighting in the Sangro River of Italy on November 18, 1943, at the age of 24, and was buried at Sangro River War Cemetery. In memory of his son, Gibbs composed his third symphony: "Westmorland".
- Gibbs was a longtime friend of English poet Walter de la Mare.
- Gibbs received two awards for musical composition: the Arthur Sullivan Prize in the 1920s, and a Doctorate in Music at Cambridge University in 1931.
- Gibbs' daughter, Elizabeth Ann Gibbs (1922-2012) produced "Cecil Armstrong Gibbs: A Personal Memoir" an essay for the British Music Society Journal in 1989 about her father's work. She and her husband Lyndon Rust also created the Armstrong Gibbs Society in 2003, and Ann provided the foreword for "Armstrong Gibbs: A Countryman Born and Bred", but died before the book's publication in 2014.
- Gibbs' musical style was inspired by the music of Claude Debussy, and reportedly hated the works of Richard Wagner and Arnold Schoenberg.
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