June and Jennifer Gibbons

June Gibbons (born 11 April 1963) and Jennifer Gibbons (11 April 1963 – 9 March 1993) were Welsh twin sisters. They became known as "The Silent Twins", since they only communicated with each other. They wrote works of fiction. In 1981, the girls committed several crimes including vandalism, petty theft and arson, which led to them being admitted to Broadmoor Hospital. The twins were sentenced to indefinite detention under the Mental Health Act and were held for eleven years.

Early life

June and Jennifer were the daughters of Caribbean immigrants Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons. The Gibbons family moved from Barbados to the United Kingdom in the early 1960s, as part of the Windrush generation. Gloria was a housewife and Aubrey worked as a technician for the Royal Air Force. The couple also had three other children: Greta was born in 1957, David was born in 1959, and Rosie was born in 1967.

In 1960, Aubrey went to stay with a relative in Coventry and soon qualified as a staff technician. Gloria followed, with Greta and David, several months later. The twins were born on 11 April 1963, at a military hospital in Aden, Yemen, where their father had been deployed. The family soon relocated, first to England, and, in 1974, to Haverfordwest, Wales. The twin sisters were inseparable and their language, a sped-up Bajan Creole, made it difficult for people to understand them. In 2023, June said, "We had a speech impediment. Our parents couldn't understand a word that we were saying, nobody understood - so we stopped talking."