On a December morning in 1906, a borough magistrate in Tynemouth opened his front door and found his doormat gone. It was india rubber, worth one pound ten shillings, and by the time he noticed it was missing it had already been carried sixty feet downhill, into a kitchen in North Shields, cut into pieces, and sold for scrap.

The women who took it were a mother and her two daughters. The mother, Mary Ann Marr, had already served fourteen days for putting her thirteen-year-old son up to stealing a sailor's bag from the railway station. The son, by then, was six months into a four-year reformatory sentence. He was fourteen, and on somewhere between his fourteenth and eighteenth court appearance.

This is their story, told through the records they left behind.