Run of the mill
The history of the Mill Hill Missionaries – which celebrates its 150th anniversary with a Mass at Westminster Cathedral today – is closely intertwined with that of The Tablet.

Mill Hill’s founder, a young English priest who later became Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, bought The Tablet in the summer of 1868 for £900 in part to subsidise the order’s running costs.

In June 1881 he wrote to his close friend, Lady Herbert of Lea, about The Tablet: “I must do all I can to increase its efficiency and to get fresh subscribers whenever I can. Mill Hill in great measure depends on it.”

Vaughan, a hands-on editor, once described how late at night he would translate some papal document while suffering from cramps in his fingers and his legs, “because he could not stretch them out while his subeditor was curled up asleep under the table”.