Swindon is about to pay tribute to one of the greatest men in its history.

William Morris was the founder of the newspaper you are reading now, and an all-round great guy, but there has been nothing to commemorate him in the town, apart from the inscription on his grave at Christ Church.

And just to rub salt into it: although there is a new William Morris Way and a new William Morris Primary School in Swindon, they are named after a different William Morris: the renowned designer, who lived at Kelmscott.

So it is fair to say that the William Morris I am thinking of has been somewhat forgotten, but the record will be set straight by the unveiling of the latest Swindon Heritage blue plaque, in Victoria Road on Saturday.

I am delighted by this because the more you find out about him, the more you like him, and he has long been one of my all-time local heroes.

The founding of the Advertiser in 1854 obviously makes Morris a key figure in the town’s history, and showed he was years ahead of his time because, after a change in tax laws, his new paper became one of the first in the country to make news affordable to the general public.

In the 1880s he also wrote the first popular local history of the town, a charming little book called Swindon 50 Years Ago, which is still a must-read for those interested in our past.

But what makes Morris even more memorable is that he was a tireless champion of ordinary people, who used his paper to put a spotlight on anyone falling short of the high standards he believed should apply to people in authority, public office or positions of privilege.

In the winter of 1861, for example, he berated the local gentry for organising a barbecue on the ice at Coate Water and using surplus meat as a football - at a time when some people were struggling to afford food.

He was strongly opposed to blood sports and regularly stood up for people at the very bottom of the social scale - those in the Swindon workhouse - by getting himself on the Board of Guardians and for the next 25 years making a nuisance of himself whenever the inmates were being badly treated.

When he died in 1891, even one of his adversaries said he was “a man whose honesty of purpose carried him above the miserable trickery of party [politics], and whose dominant desire in the conduct of the newspaper which he edited with so much ability was to redress wrong and uphold right”.

If I had a time machine and could go back and meet great characters from history, few people in the world would be higher on my list than this William Morris - or, as I like to call him: OUR William Morris.

He is surely one of the greatest men to never have a road or a school named after him.