The true story of the ‘silent twins’ who were locked up for 11 years

Jennifer, left, and June Gibbons with author Marjorie Wallace at Broadmoor in January 1993. Photo / Getty Images

At primary school, June and Jennifer Gibbons stopped speaking to anyone but each other. A new film starring Letitia Wright shines a light on their mysterious lives.

In the early 1980s, from an untidy shared bedroom in a terraced house on an RAF estate in southwest Wales, teenage identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons set about becoming literary stars. The Pembrokeshire county town of Haverfordwest lacked the romance of Brontë country, but like those literary siblings, the Gibbons twins were industrious. They studied thesauruses, and read Austen and DH Lawrence; they spent their dole money on a writing course, completed assignments about plot, structure and dialogue, and typed up their own stories. They had little success with editors, but pooled their cash and paid a vanity publisher £700 to publish June’s novel, The Pepsi-Cola Addict, in which 14-year-old Preston Wildey-King must choose between his all-consuming love of the fizzy drink and his classmate Peggy.

Clearly the twins were creative, resourceful and ambitious, although few who had met them perceived them as such. As primary school children, repeatedly and violently bullied and racially abused, they had stopped communicating with anyone except one another — which they did in their own secret language, a mixture of English and Barbadian slang speeded up so as to be unintelligible to anyone else. Teacher upon teacher, institution after institution gave up on them. Their parents and three siblings — all completely locked out of their secretive world except for their younger sister, Rosie, to whom they sometimes spoke — learnt to coexist uneasily with the twins, who’d eat meals in their rooms and watch the living room television from a vantage point on the stairs, all the better to vanish as soon as Top of the Pops had finished.

By the time they left school at 16 with barely a qualification between them, the Gibbons twins were outcasts but leading a rich inner life, obsessed with romance. However, they were also deeply troubled. In 1981 they were arrested and held on remand for a desperate five-week spree of petty theft, vandalism and arson. The following year they were sent to Broadmoor, the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane, on an indefinite sentence. The twins were in need of treatment, it was reasoned, and no other institution was willing to take on patients with a history of arson. The twins believed that they would be held for one or two years — but ended up being kept there for 11 years until March 1993, when they were transferred to a low-security institution in Bridgend. On the way Jennifer fell into a coma. Several hours later she was dead.

The twins never became famous writers. But their story has been told — first by the Sunday Times journalist Marjorie Wallace, who visited them regularly in Broadmoor and wrote about the injustice of their treatment. They gave her access to hundreds of thousands of their words in the form of diaries, poetry and fiction, which informed her 1986 biography, The Silent Twins.

Next month, 40 years after they were detained in Britain’s most notorious psychiatric institution, a new film — also called The Silent Twins — will tell their story again, with Wallace an executive producer. Letitia Wright, the Black Panther star, plays June; Jennifer is played by Tamara Lawrance, whose breakout role was an award-winning turn as July in the 2018 BBC adaptation of the Andrea Levy novel The Long Song.

Jennifer, left, and June Gibbons as teenagers.

This dreamlike, unsettling film debuted at Cannes in May, where it received a standing ovation lasting several minutes. For its Polish director, Agnieszka Smoczynska, the power of the story lies in its universal themes of identity, love, hate, resilience and sacrifice. “What is so moving to me is that they were very cruel to the world, they were very cruel to each other — and the world was very cruel to them,” she says. “When I started to study it, I felt that their silence was their protest. They wanted to be heard but nobody heard them — nobody wanted to hear them.”

June and Jennifer Gibbons were born on April 11, 1963, on an RAF base in Aden, Yemen: June first, Jennifer 10 minutes later. Their father, Aubrey, and mother, Gloria, were from Barbados, and had moved to the UK with their two eldest children, Greta and David, in 1960 as part of the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants. Aubrey found work as a staff technician for the RAF and the family lived on bases in Coventry, Yorkshire, Devon and eventually Haverfordwest.

As toddlers the twins played happily, although they were a little slow to speak. When they did, a shared speech impediment made them difficult to understand. As young children, identical twins and the only black girls at their school in Devon, they were mercilessly targeted with racist taunts and hair-pulling; soon they stopped speaking to their classmates altogether and by the age of about eight had stopped talking at home too.

The severe bullying and racism continued in Wales. But instead of disciplining the perpetrators, teachers would dismiss the twins five minutes early to give them a head start on their tormentors for the way home. By their mid-teens they had been seen by various educational psychologists and, at 14, were transferred to a special school, Eastgate Centre for Special Education. But nothing worked: the twins would not break their silence. They also developed uncanny synchronised movements: walking in step, eating in synchrony. Sometimes in anger and frustration they turned on each other. They would fight so viciously they’d have to be physically dragged apart. But when they were separated, they became desolate and even more unreachable.

Over time a mutual resentment developed and then calcified; their diaries became filled with bitter envy over each other’s looks and literary abilities. But throughout, they also remained obsessively loyal to one another.

“Being twins is a deeper level of bond than anybody else knows — especially to be identical,” Lawrance says. “How dysphoric it must be to see a reflection that is exactly you but also not … I think for any teenage girl, trying to assert your ambition or your sensuality and having someone so close to you to whom people are comparing you, it must have been very difficult. But you also have a best friend for life. It’s the duality of that — the two extremes of love and hatred.”

Unsurprisingly, the twins never had boyfriends as teenagers. Until the spring of 1981 the closest they’d got was watching boys through binoculars from their bedroom window. But when they turned 18, hungry for romance, they started to pursue the tearaway sons of a white American RAF family, the Kennedys (not their real names), who lived nearby in Welsh Hook.

The girls would turn up at their house, and eventually the youngest two of the four brothers, Wayne and Carl, ushered them into a wild world of sex, alcohol and glue-sniffing. High and reeling, the girls pulled down their wall of silence, chattering away freely to the boys, who took full advantage of their devotion.

Both girls — first Jennifer and then June — lost their virginities to Carl, and this intensified their jealous battles. That summer the twins got into a fight while crossing a stream and June momentarily held Jennifer’s head underwater, releasing her only when she spotted a boy walking past. The girls collapsed on a bank, declaring their love for each other.

The events of the summer were recorded at length in the girls’ fevered diaries. The Kennedy boys, however, have never spoken about their relationship with the twins. Very suddenly in 1981, the boys’ father was posted elsewhere and they left with barely a goodbye, leaving the girls bereft.

The entrance to Broadmoor Hospital in June 1972. Photo / Getty Images

This is when the twins went on their fateful rampage, breaking into a school and stealing little things including Play-Doh, Sellotape and sticks of chalk. They smashed the windows of a greengrocer and a dress shop, and stole food from another school. They made prank calls to the police, egging each other on all the while. “Their spree was revenge on the boys,” Wallace says. “They were just completely devastated.”

The crescendo came the evening they burnt down a local tractor showroom. A fortnight later they broke into a technical college but were arrested before they could set it ablaze after a police officer heard them smashing a window. As they wouldn’t speak, the detective sergeant in charge of their interrogation had to communicate with them largely via written notes. The twins’ bedroom was ransacked by police, who discovered diaries in which they’d written extensively about the arson attack. They were detained in Pucklechurch Remand Centre, near Bristol, where they were visited by their shocked parents, who had no idea how their daughters had spent the past few months.

On May 27, 1982, they pleaded guilty to 16 joint charges of burglary, theft and arson at Swansea crown court. Their lawyers had advised them to do so and the girls believed that this would lead them to being sent to a hospital for treatment. In the event the judge, Mr Justice Leonard, sentenced them to be detained at Broadmoor “without limit of time” — a potential life sentence.

“I am satisfied from the evidence that has been placed before me that both defendants are suffering from a psychopathic disorder,” he said. “I am further satisfied that their disorder is of such a nature as to warrant their detention immediately for medical treatment … Regarding the information I have as to their tendencies to be dangerous to themselves and each other mutually, it is in my view necessary for the protection of the public that the two defendants should be subject to special restrictions.”

Broadmoor patients at the time included Ronnie Kray and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. “It was a huge injustice that they should have been in Broadmoor,” Wallace says. “They were no more criminally insane than other lost and troubled teenagers. I’ve never felt their arson was a serious threat to people. I don’t think they were a threat to anyone but each other.”

She says diaries confirm they checked the buildings were empty before they set them on fire. Smoczynska calls their treatment “unbelievable”. “They were the youngest patients in Broadmoor [at the time]. They were 19 and the next youngest was 27. They spent 11 years there. For me, it was a scandal.”

“I hope the film gives people a chance to think about the adultification of young black girls,” Lawrance says. “And how the criminal justice system has a part to play in the scandal. Things like this still happen — people are overcriminalised, overcharged. I hope people are forced to do some internal interrogation.”

Broadmoor stole the twins’ youth: they went in at 19 and were permitted to leave only a month before their 30th birthday. Incredibly, they had been optimistic when they went in: psychiatrists and lawyers had presented their stay as a sort of “time out”. In fact, life was hard — claustrophobic, ritualised. Behaviour determined where and how you lived: troublesome patients ended up in sparse rooms, pliant patients won privileges such as more space and desks. Once inside, the twins’ teenage envy curdled into something darker and they became locked into a cycle of fighting, separation and being reunited. They seemed unable to live together or apart.

In those days Jimmy Savile stalked Broadmoor’s halls in his dubious role as a volunteer. “I’ll never forget when Savile came dancing along in his jangly suit, and he said to the twins, ‘I’ll take you first, you second,’ " Wallace recalls. “As he goes, the twins look at each other and me, and say, ‘And we thought we were mad!’ " Savile was later accused of abusing six patients. There is no suggestion he abused the twins.

They were eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic and medicated, although this diagnosis has been disputed, especially by Wallace, who lobbied psychiatrists on their behalf. Last month, at her home in London, Wallace — who went on to found the mental health charity Sane in 1986, and remains its chief executive — showed me reams of the twins’ writings that she keeps. She was captivated by their creativity. As were Smoczynska, Wright and Lawrance. “Reading the diaries and discovering how creative they were really spun us, taught us to see the different layers of who they were,” Wright says. “We were in awe of them.”

They were no more criminally insane than other lost and troubled teenagers.

Marjorie Wallace

As time went on the twins adapted to Broadmoor’s monotony, sitting exams in computer studies, maths and English, and June would work in the garden. They watched Neighbours and joined the choir, although neither could sing. Finally, in the spring of 1992, Broadmoor doctors decided the twins could be transferred to a less secure facility. The Caswell Clinic, a new unit in Bridgend, agreed to take them.

After a few months of paperwork, they were released. At about 1pm on March 9, 1993, a minibus arrived to take them to their new unit. Five hours later, Jennifer was dead.

The twins’ writings scattered at her feet, Wallace tells me about the afternoon Jennifer informed her that she was going to die, in a tea room at Broadmoor. “We were chatting and laughing, and in the middle of this Jennifer said, ‘Marjorie, Marjorie, I’m going to die.’ I absolutely froze, and when Jennifer said this, June nodded. And they made their pact sign.” She crosses her fingers. “And I knew that they meant it.”

Officially, Jennifer’s death, at 6.15pm on the day of the twins’ transfer, was recorded as acute myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle. There can be many causes, such as viral infections, but cases rarely lead to death. Staff said that in the weeks beforehand, Jennifer was withdrawn, had barely eaten and was sick several times the day before she died. It could have been a horrible coincidence but Wallace’s chilling anecdote points to a notion — however far-fetched — that Jennifer offered herself in sacrifice, that “it was part of the pact, part of their destiny, as they would call it”.

Wright and Lawrance are spellbinding as June and Jennifer. They worked with voice and movement coaches to synchronise their actions. “We were working with a team that were really open but really sensitive to the fact that they don’t know what it means to be a young black woman in Wales in the Eighties,” Wright says. “They wanted to collaborate with us to dive deeper into some of the topics that would be difficult for them to understand.”

Smoczynska tells me June is happy with the new movie and that she plans to reissue The Pepsi-Cola Addict, and hopes to publish her sister’s book The Pugilist, about a boy with a heart condition whose surgeon father implants in him the heart of the family dog.

“I think this is a very beautiful ending to the story,” Smoczynska says. Had they not been condemned to Broadmoor, who knows how different it could have been? “I wanted to present their inner world, to pay tribute to their writings and to them,” Smoczynska says. “We were fascinated by how strong they were.”

Written by: Phoebe Luckhurst

© The Times of London