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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

“Before you meet with God,” St. Peter remarked,  “I thought I should tell you — we’ve looked at your life, and you really didn’t do anything particularly good or bad. We’re not at all sure what to do with you. Can you tell us anything that can help us make a decision?”

The newly arrived soul thought for a moment and replied, “Yeah, once I was driving along and came upon a woman who was being harassed by a group of bikers. So I pulled over, got out my tyre iron, and went up to the leader of the bikers. He was a big, muscular, hairy guy with ugly tattoos all over his body and rings through his nose.

Well, I tore the nose ring right out of his nose, and told him he and his gang had better stop bothering the woman or they would have to deal with me!”

“I’m impressed,” St. Peter responded, “When did this happen?”

“About two minutes ago,” came the reply.

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.

Back in ‘45, with the Western war over and only a minor fracas with some shrapnel to show for it, and God above, if I`d been an inch taller I would have lost my head altogether, I was motorcycling east through Hungary and Romania with the intent of reaching Persia as quickly as possible. BUT by the time I`d made it to the Black Sea the bloody Americans, AND, the Nazis were on my trail and here’s why…

On entering Poland on foot I had stolen an American Indian 741 motorcycle and, murphys law, close to freedom and the Slovakian border Nazi Officers from Dr. Wachter’s unit in Krakow, ambushed and arrested me.

I thought I was doomed but my luck turned and in the bloody fire fight that followed I found, would you believe it, in the safe of the now bullet riddled Dr. Wachter’s office, a sacred copy of the Zoroastrian Gathas hymns which, Lady Luck smiling down upon me, I knew I could trade with the Persian Shah Mohammed Pahlavi for a very handsome stipend indeed.

I commandeered a leaky bucket of a sailboat tub named the “Tyranena” and endeavoured to cross the Black Sea. Well , that’s another adventure altogether, and to cut a long story short I entered safely, disguised as a Latvian aristocrat into the Persian Court carrying the sacred Gathas tablets, and into the favour of the Shah. It was here in the Crimson Court of the King, that I learnt the sacred recipe of the holy pomegranate and the golden chicken…

To my mind it’s the best chicken recipe in the world and I`ll I share this gift from the gods above here, with you, very soon.

Sincerely yours,

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.