If you have any questions or need help you can email us. One chilly afternoon in December the boat train for Dieppe pulled into Folkestone harbour, boilers hissing and clouds of steam filling the platforms. The shouts of the porters and the clatter of carts and trolleys mixed with the sound of slamming carriage doors as the passengers disembarked, pulled their coats around them against the chill and made for the immigration shed.
Among them was a woman of confident bearing, whose raccoon skin coat and matching hat who had many passengers nudging each other as she passed. Handsome, bold type of woman. The enigma of Mata Hari and the shadowy world of espionage and counter-espionage in which she became embroiled has created a myth that endures more than a century after her death. Countless books, newspaper profiles and feature films, including a Hollywood blockbuster starring Greta Garbo, have contributed to raising her story beyond simple biography into a fable, an epic, a tale too fantastic to be true.
She was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, daughter of a milliner in Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands, who went bankrupt and ran away with another woman when Margaretha, who had always been his favourite, was just Her mother died two years later and the four Zelle siblings were sent to live with different relatives.
In her late teens she saw a newspaper advertisement placed in search of a wife by Rudolf MacLeod, a military officer in the Dutch East Indies and twice her age.
On a whim Marghareta answered the ad and in married MacLeod, moved to Asia, bore him two children and endured nine years of his womanising, heavy drinking and jealous rages at the attentions she received from other men, not to mention the syphilis she contracted from him almost immediately after their marriage. By the couple, openly detesting each other, returned to the Netherlands and went their separate ways. This imagery of a new dawn marked a fresh start as a woman in control of her own destiny and the hearts of men.
