Thomas Guppy (1797-1882), engineer son of Sarah Guppy, lived here. After years of Continental travel, Guppy returned to Bristol in 1824 and took up the Friars Sugar Refinery with his brother Samuel. However, in 1830, he set up a company for constructing the railway from Bristol to London with Brunel. After one failure, the Bill for construction was passed through Parliament in 1832. In 1835, on Brunel’s suggestion, they began developing plans to extend the Great Western’s reaches – to include a steamer from Bristol to New York. The Great Western started on its first voyage to New York on Sunday, the 8th of April, 1838, at 8 am., and arrived at New York at 2.00 pm on Monday, the 23rd of April, having consumed only three-fourths of the coal taken on board.
Later in life, Guppy became the Directing Engineer of the Great Western Steamship Company, of which Mr. Brunel was the Consulting Engineer, and at the company's works at Bristol he constructed the iron steamship the Great Britain in the years 1841 to 1844.
Thomas Guppy's nephew Robert Lechmere Guppy lived in Trinidad where he described a fish which was named Girardinus Guppii in his honour in 1866. It turned out that there was a prior description of the same fish from South America so the taxonomic name was changed, but it is still commonly known as the Guppy.
