Toby Esterhase

Toby Esterhase is a character in John le Carré's George Smiley novels. He was played by Bernard Hepton in the television adaptations of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "Smiley's People".

Toby is Hungarian, stiff backed, with silvery hair and a crisp, unfriendly jaw; he rarely smiles. Connie called him 'Tiny Toby'. He was head of Lamplighters before the fall of Control. Toby owed George Smiley his career at the Circus. Smiley recruited Toby in Vienna, where he was a starving student living in the ruins of a museum of which his dead uncle had been curator. He has a son at Westminster and a daughter at Medical school. Haydon called him "Our shadow foreign secretary". The Janitors called him "Snow White" because of his hair.

Peter Guillam had worked with Toby some eight years before the fall of Control on a one-time operation to spike a pair of Belgian arms dealers in Berne, Switzerland. The operation was blown and Guillam marvelled at the coolness of Toby as the two of them made their escape. In Guillam's view, Toby was a snob — he knew the places to eat and be seen, he washed his own clothes, and at night he wore a net over his snow-white hair. They lived together in Berne for three months, monitoring the Belgians, and Guillam knew him no better at the end than he did on the first day. Guillam didn't even know Toby's country of origin.

The "Lamplighters" section Esterhase ran was responsible for close-surveillance, safe houses, and similar support operations. Esterhase allowed the section to be almost entirely given over to servicing Alleline's London Station and Source Merlin, and his importance in the Circus rose dramatically after the fall of Control.

In "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", Esterhase is revealed as being the character who performs intelligence drops to Soviet agents, on the orders of Bill Haydon. These drops are made innocently, in the belief that they are "sweeteners" to make Soviet agents working for the British appear favourable to their Soviet spymasters, whereas they are in fact the material drops of key information to Karla.

In chapter 6 of "The Secret Pilgrim" (1990) is recounted a rather farcical anecdote placed at some time after the events of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", where Esterhase gets rid of a charlatan—an exile Hungarian professor based in Frankfurt, who provides the British with virtually worthless information—by successfully convincing the Americans that he is a dauntless anti-Communist hero.

In that story, Esterhase is mentioned as having secured a major position within the shaken and broken Circus. At some later time, however, Esterhase was removed from the Circus, setting himself up as an art dealer of dubious taste and morality before being recalled to duty in "Smiley's People".

Though never explicily referred to, the character's name is clearly drawn from the well-known Hungarian aristocratic family of Esterházy.

In Other Media

Bernard Hepton played Esterhase in the BBC dramatizations of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "Smiley's People". In the former he played Esterhase as a typical Englishman with an Oxbridge accent, which displayed a high education. In "Smiley's People" he adopted a more Eastern-European accent.