The Most Ravishing Women of All Time: 3 – Mata Hari

Introduction

Mata Hari was the early 20th Centuries most ravishing women. She travelled the world and was finally executed by firing squad for spying at the end of the First World War. Born into a prosperous middle-class family in Leeuwarden, Friesland, Holland, her life started ordinarily enough. It ended staring down the barrel of guns, after a conflict that ripped the heart out of all of Europe. How did Mata Hari’s amazing life come to pass?

Thank-you, Daddy

Adam Zelle, Margareetha’s father owned a wee hat shop in a sleepy Dutch town. He invested wisely, so that by the time Margareetha was a lass, she could want for nougat. Up until she was thirteen, Margareetha was educated at Holland’s finest girl’s schools, fed and clothed in comfort and generally had a very nice childhood. When she was about sixteen, though, it all crumbled; her father bankrupt by 1889 with her mother leaving them in a bitter-divorce soon thereafter.

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Woe Betide Me

After enduring her parent’s hate, young Margareetha (Mata Hari) saw her mum die. She fled Leeuwarden for the nearby Sneek where her kindly Godfather took responsibility for her final years of schooling. She applied herself to her books, drowning her grief in school and graduating a humble kindergarten teacher. A far cry yet from a future-fate that was to take her around the world and into the arms of Generals and Kings.

God, You Are Beautiful

Whispers of Mata Hari’s allure started to surface in the local Sneek kindergarten when her horrified Godfather discovered she was having an affair with the headmaster. The headstrong Margareetha was fed up with the shackles of Sneek, and her strict Godfather, fleeing this boring little provincial town for the bright lights and glamour of Holland’s arts capital, The Hague.  It was, “Bye-bye, Sneek,” and, “Hello, Den Hague,” and a glimmer of what was to come in this beauties’ future.

Oh, Okay, if I Must Marry

Young Margareetha was now 18 – footloose and fancy free. She may also have been depressed, from all those years of woe and boring schooling, so she answered an ad in a local paper, placed there by one Rudolph MacLeod, for a wife. They married and her involvement with military men was just beginning.  He was a Dutch Colonial Officer who, after the birth of their first-born son, whisked the young Margareetha off to distant Java, in present-day Indonesia. This, of course, was in the years before air travel, so it was to be her first glimpse at a world outside the graying walls of old Holland. Margareetha was now surrounded by the exotic spice-jungles of the Far East to which she took an instant liking. In this sweaty atmosphere, she bore Rudolph a baby girl, but the marriage was a sham.