June and Jennifer Gibbons

June and Jennifer Gibbons (born April 11, 1963; Jennifer died in 1993), were identical twins who grew up in Wales. They became known as 'The Silent Twins' owing to their choice to communicate only with their immediate family. They began writing works of fiction but turned to crime in a bid for recognition. Both women were committed to Broadmoor Hospital where they were held for 14 years.

Early life

June and Jennifer were the daughters of West Indian immigrants Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons. Gloria was a housewife and Aubrey worked as a technician for the Royal Air Force. Shortly after their birth in Barbados, their family moved to Haverfordwest, Wales. The twin sisters were inseparable, and had speech impediments that made them difficult to understand for people outside their immediate family, and they mixed very little with other children. School was traumatic for them; they were ostracized in the school. Eventually the school administrators had to send them home early each day to avoid being bullied and give them a head start. Their language became even more idiosyncratic at this time - an idioglossia - and became unintelligible to outsiders. They spoke to no one except each other and their younger sister Rose, and became even more isolated.

When they turned 14, after a succession of therapists had tried unsuccessfully to get them to communicate with others, they were sent to separate boarding schools in an attempt to break their isolation. The pair became catatonic and entirely withdrawn when parted.

Creative expression

When they were reunited, the two spent a couple of years isolating themselves in their bedroom, engaged in elaborate play with dolls. They created many plays and stories in a sort of soap opera style, reading some of them aloud on tape as gifts for their sister. Inspired by a pair of gift diaries at Christmas 1979, they began their writing careers. They sent away for a mail order course in creative writing, and each wrote several novels. Set primarily in the United States and particularly in Malibu, California, an excitingly exotic locale to romantic girls trapped in a sleepy Welsh town, the stories concerned young men and women who become involved in strange and often criminal behaviour.

In June's Pepsi-Cola Addict, the high-school hero is seduced by a teacher, then sent away to a reformatory where a homosexual guard makes a play for him. In Jennifer's The Pugilist, a physician is so eager to save his child's life that he kills the family dog to obtain its heart for a transplant. The dog's spirit lives on in the child and ultimately has its revenge against the father. Jennifer also wrote Discomania, the story of a young woman who discovers that the atmosphere of a local disco incites patrons to insane violence. She followed up with The Taxi-Driver's Son, a radio play called Postman and Postwoman, and several short stories. They wrote in a unique personal style, often with unwittingly amusing word choices.

Crime and hospitalization

Their novels were published by a vanity press called New Horizons, and they made many attempts to sell short stories to magazines, but were unsuccessful. A brief fling with some American boys, the sons of a U.S. Navy serviceman, led nowhere. Desperate for recognition and fame (and perhaps publicity for their books), the girls committed a number of petty crimes including arson, which led to their being committed to Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security mental health hospital. There they remained for 14 years. Placed on high doses of antipsychotic medications, they found themselves unable to concentrate; Jennifer apparently developed tardive dyskinesia. Their medications were apparently adjusted sufficiently to allow them to continue the copious diaries they had begun in 1980, and they were able to join the hospital choir, but they lost most of their interest in creative writing.

The case achieved some notice due to newspaper coverage by The Sunday Times journalist Marjorie Wallace. The Sun, a British tabloid gave a brief but accurate account of their story, headlined "Genius Twins Won't Speak" (an apparent reference to their having tested above average intelligence when being considered for Broadmoor Hospital).

Jennifer's death

According to Wallace, the girls had long had an agreement that if one died, the other must begin to speak and live a normal life. During their stay in the hospital, they began to believe that it was necessary for one twin to die, and after much discussion, Jennifer agreed to be the sacrifice. Within hours after their release in 1993, Jennifer died of sudden inflammation of the heart (reported initially as viral myocarditis). There was no evidence of drugs or poison in her system. To this day, Jennifer's death remains a mystery.

After Jennifer's death, June gave interviews with Harper's Bazaar and The Guardian. She became more communicative and was able to speak with other people. She lived at home with her family in Haverfordwest apparently until 2005, when she began living with her partner in a nearby town. She contemplates resuming her writing, although she describes her early books as "all over the place" and not very good. After Wallace's book appeared, Pepsi-Cola Addict became a valuable collector's item, and the novel has been reprinted several times.^{[citation needed]}

Popular culture

• Jon Amiel, The Silent Twins (1985)
• Lucie Brock-Broido, "Elective Mutes", a poem with June as narrator. In A Hunger (Knopf, 2005) ISBN 0-394-75852-8.
• Vanessa Walters, Double Take (drama)
• Radiohole, None of It: More Or Less Hudson's Bay, Again
• Manic Street Preachers, "Tsunami" On This Is My Truth—Tell Me Yours
• Luke Haines, "Discomania" on The Oliver Twist Manifesto
• Picture Frame Seduction, " Forgotten Daughters" (1984 track on Hand of the Rider written for the Jon Amiel film The Silent Twins)
• Dog and Pony Theater, Chicago, The Twins Would Like To Say, written and directed by Seth Bockley and Devon de Mayo.
• Speechless, a play by Linda Brogan & Polly Teale, produced at the Arcola Theatre, London, 2011

External links

• Oliver Sacks, Bound Together in Fantasy and Crime New York Times review of The Silent Twins, October 19, 1986.
• Jennifer Gibbons, 29, 'Silent Twin' of a Study Announcement of Jennifer's death in the New York Times, March 12, 1993.
• Dark Ride, A french article about the sisters.
• Have I the strength to kill her? Guardian article about April deAngelis and Errollyn Wallen's 2007 opera about the twins.
• Review of The Pepsi-Cola Addict by Anthony Brockway, on babylonwales.com, February 4, 2007.