It is staggering that teenagers June and Jennifer Gibbons were sent to Broadmoor indefinitely alongside Peter Sutcliffe and Ronnie Kray.
A report by Patricia Nicol for The Sunday Times.
For more than 40 years the strange story of the “silent twins” June and Jennifer Gibbons has fascinated the public. Aged 19, having written novels and dreamt of becoming authors, the pair became Broadmoor’s youngest inmates, detained indefinitely alongside notorious psychopaths like Peter Sutcliffe and Ronnie Kray. Their crimes, three counts of arson on empty buildings aside, were petty, their rap sheet included pilfering stationery, including Plasticine “worth £48.50”. Yet they would remain at Broadmoor for 11 years.
Their story has inspired books, documentaries and a feature film. What singles out June: Voice of a Silent Twin (BBC Sounds) is that it is the surviving twin, June, who falteringly unfolds her own, desperately sad story. The result is a compassionate, deftly made and gripping nine-part podcast series.
The problems for June and Jennifer began long before their teenage crime spree in Haverfordwest made them Pembrokeshire pariahs. They were the youngest children of Gloria and Aubrey, immigrants from the Caribbean. Aubrey worked for the RAF, so the family moved often. The twins’ first unsuccessful experience of school was in Yorkshire. They had speech impediments and struggled to make themselves understood. Therapy made the already shy pair retreat further. In Devon these problems were compounded by a severe headmaster.
A posting to west Wales seemed a fresh opportunity. “Would you believe it, the very first day I went to school I was quite normal: talking, eager to learn, putting my hand up … But it all faded away; I must have lost confidence,” June recalls.
The educational psychologist Tim Thomas remembers the twins being bullied and becoming “electively mute”. They developed an eerie way of moving slowly together in sync and were sent to a specialist school. “We started to realise they were separate individuals trapped in this relationship,” Thomas says. But efforts to set each girl on a path of her own foundered. They left school at 16 with no prospects but the increasingly resented inevitability of each other.
Listening to the early episodes of this extraordinary story, I kept thinking of the Brontës. This is not fanciful: after their formal education, the isolated, introverted pair schooled themselves in great literature. Their diary entries and fiction, here voiced by actors, are well-written and riveting. Then, aged 18, a catastrophic sexual obsession spun their lives from the cloistered, imaginary realm of their bedroom into the all-too-real world.
Even if you think you know the story, give this a listen. June’s testimony (Jennifer died in 1993), and those of Thomas and the former Sunday Times journalist Marjorie Wallace, who wrote and campaigned about the twins’ plight, will move you. Theirs is a harrowing story of a staggering miscarriage of justice. I have listened up to the eighth episode (the sixth will be out next week) and am agog to hear the end.
It is staggering that teenagers June and Jennifer Gibbons were sent to Broadmoor indefinitely alongside Peter Sutcliffe and Ronnie Kray. A report by Patricia Nicol for The Sunday Times. For more than 40 years the strange story of the “silent twins” June and Jennifer Gibbons has fascinated the public. Aged 19, having written novels and
