New lease of life for tandem hearse after owner rethinks sale

The owner of a tandem bicycle hearse who put it up for sale because of the effort required to pedal it is having a rethink as a result of the huge interest expressed in the unusual coffin-carrying vehicle.

Former Pentecostal minister Reverend Paul Sinclair, who owns Leicestershire-based Motorcycle Funerals, had the £2,250 specially adapted tandem built with the help of a motorcycle sidecar racing engineer following requests from cyclists.

In an article last week in the Daily Mail, however, he revealed that he had become too unfit to pedal it himself and was thinking of putting it up for sale since he could find no-one locally willing to ride the unusual bike on a casual basis. The response to that article, however, has led him to have second thoughts.

Reverend Sinclair, who set up the business ten years ago, told the Rutland & Stamford Mercury: "Because we do a motorcycle and sidecar hearse, every now and again we were asked to do the funeral of cyclists, because it was the nearest thing they could get to a bicycle. So in the end I built one, a coffin-carrying bicycle. I call it a bicycle made for three.

"I said I wanted to sell it because I was struggling to ride it. But I have had so much interest in it since I said that, and people saying 'Oh, I'd like to use that', I think what I should be doing is hunting out someone fit enough to ride the thing for me."

The hearse was on display last week at the International Christian Resources Exhibition in Exeter in a themed zone relating to bereavement services called Return To Sender.