I had Leeds Uni phone me up last week - sadly, it wasn’t Leeds United offering me that long overdue position as striker, but the University Alumni Society asking me what exactly I’d done with my history degree, writes Cllr Brian Smedley.

Fearing they wanted it back I quickly put my mind to mind to an explanation.

This weekend Bridgwater History Day happened.

This is the eighth one we’ve held now, and they’ve all been packed out demonstrating how popular our town’s history is with its people.

Back in the 1970s, signposts started to appear saying ‘Welcome to Historic Bridgwater’ - I didn’t know exactly what they were referring to then and assumed it was the fact that the 1970 by-election was the first where 18-year-olds could vote, but in fact on reflection absolutely everything about Bridgwater is historic.

When I do walking tours of the town with foreign visitors, I can tell them the history of Britain from the history of Bridgwater.

The Romans settled at Crandon Bridge and started the first port.

The River Parrett took its name from the dividing line between the Saxons and the Celts, not some budgie.

King Arthur fought battles here and was buried at nearby Glastonbury, where Jesus himself once walked with his feet in ancient times.

King Alfred held back the Danes from the marshes around us and went forward to unite and create England.

The Normans built a great castle here and one of them called Walter built a bridge giving the town its name.

Royals repressed, peasants revolted, rebels raised their flags, tyrants hung drew and quartered us but that didn’t seem to bother the people of Bridgwater.

We were the first town to petition against the evil Slave Trade in 1785, and the first town to vote in an MP to end the 1930s policy of appeasement against fascism (Vernon Bartlett in 1938).

So, all that’s quite impressive I thought as I opened the Bridgwater History Day from the stage of the country’s first arts centre.

And I thought other places must be proper jealous of our town’s history and I sensed at the History Day a sense of pride.

Bridgwater’s a bit different and that’s why we’re special.

This year at History Day we learnt that Breaker Morant had been born at the town’s workhouse.

The 1980 film about him was shown on national TV last week during Remembrance Day.

We learnt that the still visible timbers of a giant cargo ship along Berrow beach were those of the Nornen, which was cast onto the Gore sands during a storm in 1897 and the crew rescued by heroic local lifeboatmen.

We learnt that famous song-finder Cecil Sharp regularly came to Bridgwater to unearth English folk music and had 38 contacts in the bars and workplaces of the town and from who he rebuilt and recorded the entire history of British folk song.

And we learnt of the heroic flyers of World War 2 that were based at the Weston Zoyland airfield – Not just Brits but Americans, Poles and Czechs.

And finally, we learnt of the struggles of ordinary working people across Somerset and specifically the Somerset miners who existed as virtual chattels of the greedy Mine owners and the landowners who took their percentage of the exploitation too.

So when Jacob Rees Mogg appears on Question Time saying ‘Somerset’s the best place in the world to live’ he’s right... and considering his own family’s history as coalfield landowners, it certainly has been for them...

And if we don’t learn from history….will we ever?