Tommy Eytle

Tommy Eytle was a Guyanese calypso musician and actor who portrayed Jules Tavernier in EastEnders from 1990 to 1993 as a regular character and 1994 to 1997 as a recurring character.

He arrived here for a holiday from his native Guyana on Festival of Britain Day in 1951, but Tommy Eytle, who played granddad Jules Tavernier, decided to stay. He worked first as a surveyor and draughtsman, then as a bandleader at some of London's top hotels.

Eytle was a self-taught guitarist and in the early 1950s, he formed Tommy Eytle's Calypso Band in response to the surge of interest in African and Caribbean music at the time. The band performed a mix of Afro-Caribbean music and modern jazz and in addition to playing the jazz guitar, Eytle provided the band's vocals. They performed in many jazz venues and nightclubs around the country, including the Sunset Club, The Bag O'Nails, Club Basie, Pigalle and Al Burnett’s Stork Club.

Tommy Eytle's Calypso Band were featured in many BBC plays and were most notable for performing "Narrative Calypso" in the film The Tommy Steele Story, in which Eytle sang and played the guitar.

Eytle worked as a professional musician until the late 1980s, but he was forced to give up playing the guitar due to early onset arthritis in his hands. However, he continued to sing jazz and calypsos into the mid-1990s and was given occasional acoustic solos in BBC's EastEnders, which he sang — in-character — during scenes in the soap's pub, The Queen Vic.