Grab it now if you are New Zealands South Island here

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If you are in New Zealand’s South Island then you may purchase and pick up this original hand made piece of rock and roll themed hardwood haberdashery through this link.

See you on the next world,

Charlie.

After my experiences with the Nib Nab Peoples in Gamibia I am back in the land of the living and have just completed, entirely by my own fair hand,  this flight case styled wooden suit, or ahem, coffin for an unlucky friend of a friend! Entirely hand made this custom crafted coffin can be made to your exacting specifications for a highly reasonable stipend, plus shipping. Don’t hesitate to contact me via email if you have any custom casket requirements. I am also offering custom hand built caskets in a range of hues and colours and details of these will be here as soon as I can muster the camera!

Oh, Just one more thing – this coffin is also available with glass shelving within the main body and the lid may also be supplied with legs to use as a table.

Eternally yours,

Charlie.

Cheers,
Charlie Underwood

Good morrow everybody,

Last week I came back from my trip into the woods and celebrated with an indulgent feast at the birthday of my distant cousin Belzer Herrison. I had brought back some fine timbers from the heart of the untouched forest – straight and true & free from the curse of knots and checks with the intention of fashioning them into a fine set of shelves to display my late, great uncles collection of ephemera, gewgaws, odds and sods, ‘wossanames’ and what-have-you’s. Belzer had always reminded me of Cyrano or the Monyet Belanda, but his charm was legendary.

We met up at Three Sheets for a few wee drams of Lavagulan’s finest 18 year old Scotch and headed out to meet the rest of the gang at the L’olonnaise Bar and Grill. As we lit out into the street Belzer eulogised about the old days in Moostissoostikwan – he would row the old boat across the water to an island where Shaky Harry would still old style likker: a recipe of raw alcohol, burnt sugar, a little chewing tobacco and a touch of gunpowder. He drank like a fish back then, but couldn’t swim. Belzer’s wife, Victoria was busy meanwhile delivering the liqourice and mint birthday cake she had ordered from Heaven, Custard & Co. in town.

With a rack of the legendary L’olonnaise Pirate ribs, salade couler and pomme frites due on the next wind I set about reacquainting myself with the distant family. What a house of horrors! Falling out of the ugly tree they’d hit every branch on the way down.
Most had the unfortunate blessing of Belzer’s unique cleft chin and hideously dimpled and pocked carrot-nose, the wiry ginger locks and bilious complexion coupled with a personality vacuum they were yet to fill, as had he, with compensating character. Belzer’s Gran’pa Brigadier “Solly” “Brig” Solomon sat at the head, but he was silent and hadn’t spake a word in months – he`d always been a long faced, miserable old git; even after they took his adenoids out BUT he was thoroughly sour these days: he’d been very ill for months with the dreaded mu ognob lurgy…something about a witchdoctor’s curse in Bzuzu, a rhinocerous and a set of bathroom taps.

That’s not to say the young ones weren’t stupid and recalcitrant as well as bloody ugly; not to say their mouths weren’t working overtime – they bickered and shrieked like gulls about a bag of chips, swore like troopers and upon the food’s arrival fought like scurvy mongrels over each others repasts. I ordered another Lavagulan while Belzer regaled me with more tales of his time in the Carrot Valley. By the time the ribs arrived I was on my fourth glass and Belzer on his sixth. And justly so, the delinquents were in complete uproar.

Suddenly!
The table exploded – the food started to fly.
And that’s when Brigadier Solomon forced himself to his feet like a broken robot and promptly collapsed face first onto his Texas Style Chicken Armadillo’s: alternating layers of bacon and cheese sliced into laminated chicken breasts soaked in the latest chef’s effluent.
Again and Suddenly!
Everything stopped. Silence.

“At last!” I thought to myself as the paramedics lifted the Brig from his dinner “Some peace and quiet.” But for a few whispers the celebrations were over. As Brigadier Solomon rolled by I couldn’t help looking into his empty eyes, frozen with fear, thinking to myself “…he’s a gonner this time; six foot one by three and a half, white, chrome furniture, with the Union Jack”. Looking askance at the oikish children Belzer whispered into my ear, “It’s been a long time coming Charlie, but the old buzzard’ll probably make it through for another month of misery…’nother whiskey?”
“Yes, why not?” I gazed around at everyone’s half finished meals and said nothing at all: the blaggards at the table next to us had accepted from the waitress and were stuffing into their eager mouths between fits of laughter and plastic glasses of cheap wine  Belzer’s liquorice and mint birthday cake.

People often ask me what kind of music I listen to while I’m building my caskets and coffins, after all, you’d think it was quite a lonesome and maybe even a sad  task, but, to be honest with you it’s a labour of love for me.

I don’t really see it as the end, more like a chance to make a new start and when it comes to religion; well I think it’s up to each and every man to make his own choices!

Because I make each casket and coffin by my own hand I get plenty of time to listen to the radio and sometimes I just have to laugh when a certain song gets me laughing.

It’s no laughing matter to some but I nearly lost a finger in the bandsaw when “Going Underground” came on today!

See you soon, Charlie.

In late 1882 – ‘83 my great great uncle Obadiah Underwood left Montpellier, Vermont under the midnight moon, and blasting through New Hampshire upon his brother Lafayette’s stallion “The Lieutenant”, made haste to Rhode Island where he stowed away upon a merchant vessel heading for the Indian subcontinent. Uncle Sam was getting into all sorts of trouble in a new depression or the “Rich Mans Panic” as it was often called and HE said it was, “All acause o’ them damned devil curs’d trains…And those greedy sons of bitches politicians!”

Obadiah was a blaggard: a tricktser, a womaniser, an alcoholic gambler of ill repute and a self proclaimed expert of many arts but truth be told, he was in fact a master of only two – making caskets and telling lies. From his harlot mother he had also inherited a huge arrogance, a laziness of character and a taste beyond his means for the epicurean.

When the depression hit hard he was in the Saloon Bar with his cronies drinking and playing at cards:

“… no need for a coffin builder of reputation to sully his “workin’ art” with the penniless dead of a hungry, filthy, misguided mob. They aint got no gold in their teeth!”

Of course in those days a man could lose his life over a drap of old rhye and Obadiah’s refusal to make an affordable casket was not to be taken lightly…A specialist could oft be found swinging from the nearest oak if the general consensus judged his work a touch on the expensive side of a little too costly. Still, he was not one to bow to no man’s code nor another’s inferior manufacture or material design -  ‘Badiah, did what he usually had to do;  he upped sticks and left town.

He, after all, and according only to his own testament, had been the lone custom manufacturer of the James family’s greatest outlaw, Jessie Woodson’s casket; and thus would not bring himself to work on the cheap. No matter how poor, lowly or desperate his customers.

Anyway this Obadiah was a superstitious man and he always carried about his person a Smith and Wesson model 3 and his deceased father’s glass eye which he said “could look deep in the future”.

One day he said he looked through the eye and saw a plague of bad fortune in the form of cholera, smallpox, malaria, AND the yellow fever visited upon the children of the European nobility, AND, when the Great Comet appeared in the sky he knew his American days were numbered, and that’s another reason why he stowed away – to make his fortune from the small, white bones and sorrow of the European royalty.

Gt. Gt. Uncle Obadiah Underwood with some of his "furniture" (far left).

Whilst onboard the merchant vessel he came across the famous Oriental, gold-mining midget Yeffer-San whom he employed as his valet and retainer, for he could not breakfast, abroad alone, in the company of the nobility and offered a cut of the future mercantile for each child’s casket. Yeffer-San in time though, would also come to feature as the perfect casket template for the newly deceased children of the European elite. I`ll be filling you in, as is my business, in a forthcoming post!

Yours Eternally,

Charlie Underwood.

This whole internet caboodle is somewhat ..er..strange. I will probably take me some time to figure it all out.

Anyways, I make bespoke and custom coffins and caskets by hand, a tradition that stretches back in my family for three generations and borne originally and entirely out of my Grandfathers misadventures in the subcontinent.

I work with my hands to build bespoke caskets and this tradition owes it’s history and character to a time when a man got paid for what he did, for craftsmanship, skill, labour, sweat and toil. In that time, when a man passed away, he would meet the Lord in an Underwood casket. I will personally build and design your casket and coffin with my own bare hands because when you lay down forever, rest assured you`ll need to be comfortable.

Eternally yours,

Charlie Underwood.

my name is Charlie Underwood and I’m a traveling casket, coffin and cabinet maker. I came into this business entirely by accident. My great grandfather, Washington Underwood, journeyed to the Indian subcontinent where he had attempted to forge an empire from an exotic coffee bean given to him by an Ethiopean mystic. During a nasty bout of malaria my grandfather’s heartbeat was irreversibly changed and he could speak only with a stutter.

One afternoon during a fracas with the Governor’s men in Ganjam, Orissa my fathers heart finally gave up the ghost and he met his untimely end.

Drawing his sabre high and clutching his sacred grounds, he fell backward into a well and expired. The remainder of the family were thrown below with feral cats and left to starve.

When the bodies were returned home my blind father, Zedoch Underwood, crafted caskets of exquisite design…a tradition that I continue, nobly and slowly to this very day. A tradition that I now can offer to you.

Yours,

Charlie Underwood.