Butch Cassidy the Dundas Street kid – famous outlaw's roots were in Sunderland

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid accurately asserts that the eponymous villains died (probably) in a hail of bullets in Bolivia in 1908, thereby ending their hitherto successful criminal careers as members of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang.

But it is not, to say the least, entirely faithful to the real story. For a start Cassidy, real name Robert LeRoy Parker, was nowhere near as good looking as Paul Newman. Nor does the film make any reference to Cassidy’s mother and other relatives living in Sunderland.

But they did.

Butch’s Wearside roots

According to Mike Bell, author of Outlaw Roots: Butch Cassidy’s British Ancestry, “Butch’s mother was born on Tyneside or Wearside” probably in 1847. Her name was Ann Campbell Gillies.

Her Scottish parents, Robert and Jane Gillies née Sinclair, were married in 1843. Robert’s brother (Butch’s great uncle) Ebenezer Gillies is recorded as living in Sunderland in 1845, where he married Esther Whitaker in March 1848.

It’s unclear exactly when the rest of the family followed Ebenezer, but the 1851 census shows Robert, Jane and their children, including Ann, as living in Newcastle.

At some point the Gillies clan had become Mormons. On December 5, 1852 a meeting was held in Easington Lane to establish a new branch of the church, with Robert Gillies as branch president.

In the 1850s they lived at 50 Dundas Street, Monkwearmouth, where today Stagecoach has a bus depot; ironic considering how many stagecoaches Butch would relieve of valuables.

This must have been after 1851 as it does not appear in that year’s census, but emigration files confirm the family address.

Ebenezer Gillies left for America in May 1854. His last address in England was Brougham Street, now a somewhat featureless road between Blandford Street and the Bridges shopping centre.