There have been many stories of twins having a special connection, from developing their own language to claiming to feel each other's pain. June and Jennifer Gibbons, however, shared a particularly rare bond and their mysterious story - which saw the pair spend 11 years in Broadmoor - has become so well-known that it has now been made into a film.
The identical twins, who moved to Haverfordwest when they were 11, had an unusually close bond. Excluding parents and siblings, the pair would only communicate with each other and wrote diary entries, novels, and poems from their Pembrokeshire bedroom. Due to their lack of communication, they became known as 'The Silent Twins.'
The story has inspired TV dramas and documentaries, a play, and even the Manic Street Preachers song, Tsunami. Now their story has been made into a film starring Letitia Wright (of Marvel's Black Panther) who plays June, alongside Tamara Lawrence as Jennifer. The film - The Silent Twins - premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and will go on release in the UK later this year. You can get more story updates straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletters here.
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June and Jennifer were born to Caribbean immigrants Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons who had moved from Barbados to the UK in the early 1960s. Aubrey's work as a technician for the RAF saw him move all over, from Yemen, where the twins were born, to Yorkshire, Devon, and then to Wales.
Aubrey said he knew his daughters had a difficulties with talking. “When they first started their schooling, we knew they had the speech problem,” he said, in an unused interview for a 1994 BBC documentary, The Silent Twin—Without My Shadow.' “In the home, they’d talk, make sounds, and all that, but we knew that they weren’t quite like, you know, normal children, talking readily.”
Indeed, the girls were described as "inseparable", with teachers noting that they only spoke to each other and their dolls. After the move to Wales, the girls started at Haverfordwest County Secondary School with their older brother, David. This period of their lives, however, would be an unhappy one.
June and Jennifer, and their siblings, were the only black children in the community, and found themselves being bullied and ostracised at school. The experience became so traumatic for the twins, that teachers started to dismiss them early from school to avoid the bullying.
Soon, their secret language became increasingly unintelligible to others and they began to become more and more isolated, speaking to nobody except each other and their younger sister, Rose. Then, in 1976, two years after the girls had started secondary school, a medic arrived to give the pupils their TB jabs.
When administering the jabs to the twins, he noted their impassive behaviour and referred the case to consultant child psychologist Evan Davies. However, when the twins wouldn't speak to him and he was unable to tell them apart, they were then referred to Ann Treharne, the chief speech therapist at Haverfordwest’s Withybush Hospital, where they began treatment in February, 1977.
Though they rarely spoke to anyone except Rose, the therapist was able record them speaking and worked out their "secret language" was a mixture of Barbadian slang and English, spoken very quickly. The girls were transferred to Eastgate Centre for Special Education in Pembroke, but remained silent in their therapy sessions.
It was then proposed that the girls, now 14, should be separated. June would stay at Eastgate in Pembroke while Jennifer would be sent 30 miles away to live at St. David’s Adolescent Unit. However, the separation was a failure and Jennifer was sent back to Eastgate. By 1979, the girls had turned 16, left school, and were on the dole.
Now back at home in Haverfordwest, the girls found a creative outlet through writing. For Christmas that year, June and Jennifer had both been gifted diaries, and kept them extensively. They pooled their money to send away for a creative writing course and began to write stories, poems, and novels, alongside their diaries.
June wrote a self-published novel called 'Pepsi-Cola Addict', in which a Malibu teenager is seduced by a teacher, then sent away to a reformatory - the novel is unavailable for purchase and held in only five libraries worldwide. Jennifer was also a keen writer, composing two novels in a matter of weeks.
'The Pugilist' was about a boy with a failing heart whose surgeon father implants in him the heart of their dog, while 'Discomania' was the story of a young woman who discovers that the atmosphere of a local disco incites patrons to violence. In one diary entry about the sibling's relationship Jennifer wrote: "We have become fatal enemies in each other's eyes.
"We feel the irritating deadly rays come out of our bodies, stinging each other's skin. I say to myself, can I get rid of my own shadow - impossible or not possible? Without my shadow, would I die? Without my shadow, would I gain life, be free or left to die? Without my shadow, which I identify with a face of misery, deception, murder."
In October, 1981, the twins, who had discovered drugs and alcohol, went on a five-week spree of vandalism, burglary, thefts and arson in Haverfordwest which ended when they were caught trying to burn down Pembrokeshire Technical College. They subsequently pleaded guilty to 16 counts of burglary, theft, and arson at Swansea Crown Court.
By May, 1982, they were sentenced under the Mental Health Act to indefinite detention at Broadmoor, where they would remain for the next 11 years. They were just 19 when they were admitted. The case gained notoriety after Sunday Times journalist Marjorie Wallace covered it. She would later write 'The Silent Twins' about the girls.
The twins continued to keep diaries in prison and were voracious readers. Over the years, they made attempts to gain release, but their applications were rejected. In their latter years at Broadmoor, they did, apparently, begin to speak a little to hospital staff. Eventually, in 1993, the decision was taken to move them to a medium-security unit closer to home - the Caswell Clinic at Glanrhyd Hospital in Bridgend.
The pair boarded a van on the morning of March 9. But when the twins arrived in Bridgend, Jennifer appeared to be physically weak and unwell. She was rushed to the Princess of Wales Hospital, Bridgend, but died at 6.30pm that evening, at just 29 years old.
A post-mortem examination revealed an undiagnosed myocarditis, inflammation of the heart. Following her sister's untimely death, June remained at the Caswell Clinic for a year, before returning to West Wales. Marjorie Wallace believes that, during their time in hospital, the twins began to think that one of them must die in order for the other to be free.
She wrote that when she had interviewed them in Broadmoor, Jennifer calmly stated that she had decided to die so that June could live a normal life. She said: "I don't think there is really an explanation for that except Jennifer willing herself to die. After I learned about Jennifer's death - it was about two or three days later - I went down to visit June. And I found her surprisingly intact, really, and very prepared to talk. She spoke very clearly about the conflict between her terrible grief at losing the person closest in her life and her - the freedom that Jennifer had given her."
Jennifer is now buried in Haverfordwest under a headstone engraved with a poem written by June. It reads: ‘We once were two/We two made one/We no more two/Through life be one/Rest in peace.’ By 2008, June was living independently in West Wales.
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