After over a century, a very special Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed sideboard has been returned to the island and placed on permanent display at the Knockaloe Centre for World War One Internment in Patrick.

The piece was created by imprisoned highly skilled craftsmen and previously exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of The Taffner Collection.

It will now make up part of The Knockaloe Charitable Trust’s new ‘Lives and Legacy’ room which tells the story of the furniture workshops and other industries within the civilian internment camp during the war.

The sideboard was part of a WWI commission by Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke, the model maker whose tiny trains, ships and planes were known all over the world.

Seeking to create a modern home for his new bride-to-be and a great admirer of German and Austrian design and craftsmanship, in 1916 Bassett-Lowke approached Charles Rennie Mackintosh to redesign the interiors of 78 Derngate in Northampton.

His approach to Charles Rennie Mackintosh for designs for the interiors came at a time when Mackintosh’s career had almost dried up and he had been suffering from depression compounded by a mistaken accusation that he was a German spy.

Letters from Bassett-Lowke to Mackintosh surviving at The Huntarian Museum at the University of Glasgow, indicate that he was very demanding and involved client, and it was Bassett-Lowke who approached the Quaker ‘Industrial Advisor’ to Knockaloe Civilian Internment Camp, James Baily, about the possibility of the German internees held prisoner at Knockaloe making the Mackintosh designed furniture.

The same furniture workshops, went onto create possibly the first ever ‘flat pack’ furniture which was made by the German and Austrian civilian internees before being shipped to France for use by the refugees returning to their ravaged French villages and homes in 1918.

Baily and German internee Charles Matt ‘prepared designs to suit the tools and materials available in the prison camp’.

The former man described how there was an acute shortage of timber at this stage in the war, and so he searched the island and managed to secure some wood stock from a boatyard in Ramsey and felled trees from Foxdale: ‘So it came about that farms and cottages in France were furnished with tables, cupboards and sideboards fashioned by German and Austrian prisoners of war, made from Manx wood.’

After the furniture to France was completed, the workshops continued with further cabinet making work, the sideboard now on display being one of the final Mackintosh designed pieces, created for Bassett-Lowke’s brother-in-law, Frank Jones, of Northampton shoemakers ‘Crocket and Jones’.

When the sideboard was due to come up for sale at auction in Philadelphia in 2019, trustees of the Knockaloe Charitable Trust, Alison and Richard Jones, knew that this significant piece needed to be brought back to the island to help to tell the story of life in internment at Knockaloe.

Having successfully won the bid by telephone, the problem then arose re bringing such a historic, and large, piece of furniture from the USA back to where it was created.

Thankfully island firm, B&B Furniture Isle of Man Limited, came to the rescue to help bring the item back.

It can now be viewed at centre in the Old Patrick Schoolhouse which is open May to September, every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday between 10am and 3pm.