The “Queen of Death” was always an unlikely soubriquet for Isla Traquair, at least for those unfamiliar with the pitch-black humour of practitioners of the printed press. Television audiences in Britain will remember her as the face of Channel 5 news, while in America she hosted consumer medical series Buy.o.Logic on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Yet before the bright lights of television news swivelled her way, Traquair started as a teenager with traditional “shoe leather” reporting in the northeast of Scotland. For every junior reporter the “death knock” is a rite of passage. It takes courage and a thick skin to knock on the door of the recently bereaved and ask how they feel, but Traquair brought to this an innate sensitivity to it.

Source: The Times December 22, 2019 00:22 UTC