Peter Guillam

Peter Guillam is a fictional character in John le Carré's series of espionage novels. He first appears in Call for the Dead at which time he is working for the Ministry of Defence, and later appears in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

In the novels

In the novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in which he is a principal character, Guillam is head of "Scalphunters", the violent division of 'The Circus' that deals with operations such as assassination, blackmail, burglary, and kidnapping. He took over the division after the failure of Operation Testify led the former section head Jim Prideaux to leave the Circus. In the aftermath of Testify's failure, the division's importance was downgraded, and being in charge of it was considered a menial position. It was looked down upon even by Guillam's friend George Smiley, who jokingly describes the division's operations as "cosh and carry".

Nevertheless Guillam is the key in finding the mole, or traitor, within the Circus. When one of his subordinates resurfaces after disappearing, claiming to have information about the mole, Guillam alerts Oliver Lacon, the Civil Service overseer of the Intelligence Service. This bypasses the "inner circle", in Alleline's direct line-of-command, who have quashed any previous suggestions of a mole. Lacon and Guillam then seek the return of Smiley – who had been dismissed by the Circus following Testify – to secretly lead an investigation of the inner circle to find the mole. During Smiley's subsequent investigations, Guillam covertly provides helpers, and himself steals information from within the Circus's registry.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a 1974 spy novel by British author John le Carré. It follows the efforts of taciturn, aging spymaster George Smiley to uncover a Soviet mole in the British Secret Intelligence Service. Since the time of its publication, the novel has received critical acclaim for its complexity, social commentary and lack of sensationalism, and remains a staple of the spy fiction genre.

Chronology

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was followed by two sequels, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley's People (1979), later published in an omnibus edition as Smiley Versus Karla (1982). These are the fifth, sixth, and seventh le Carré spy novels featuring George Smiley. Three characters who are important players in TTSS first appeared in le Carré's very first book, Call for the Dead (1961): George Smiley, Peter Guillam, and Inspector Mendel.

Title

Control, chief of the Circus, assigns the code names "Tinker", "Tailor", "Soldier", "Poor Man", and "Beggar Man" to five senior intelligence officers at the Circus. He suspects that one of the five is a Soviet mole and assigns these code names with the intention that, should his agent Jim Prideaux uncover information about the identity of the mole, Prideaux can relay it back to the Circus using an easy-to-recall codename. The names are derived from the English children's rhyme "Tinker, Tailor":

Tinker, Tailor

"Tinker Tailor" is a counting game, nursery rhyme and fortune telling song traditionally played in England, that can be used to count cherry stones, buttons, daisy petals and other items. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 802. Its American version is commonly used by children for "counting out," e.g. for choosing who shall be "It" in a game of tag.

Lyrics

The most common modern version is:

The most common American version is:

Skipping version from the 70's:

Origins

A similar rhyme has been noted in William Caxton's, The Game and Playe of the Chesse (c. 1475), in which pawns are named: "Labourer, Smith, Clerk, Merchant, Physician, Taverner, Guard and Ribald."

The first record of the opening four professions being grouped together is in William Congreve's Love for Love (1695), which has the lines:

When James Orchard Halliwell collected the rhyme in the 1840s, it was for counting buttons with the lines: "My belief - a captain, a colonel, a cow-boy, a thief." The version printed by William Wells Newell in Games and Songs of American Children in 1883 was: "Rich man, Poor man, beggar-man, thief, Doctor, lawyer (or merchant), Indian chief", and it may be from American tradition that the modern lyrics solidified.

George Smiley

George Smiley is a fictional character created by John le Carré. Smiley is an intelligence officer working for "the Circus", the British overseas intelligence agency. He is a central character in the novels Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People, and a supporting character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War and The Secret Pilgrim.

Early life

Although Smiley has no concrete biography beyond that offered briefly at the beginning of Call for the Dead, le Carré does leave clues in his novels.

Smiley was probably born around 1906 (or 1915 on the revised chronology) to middle class parents in the South of England, and attended a minor public school and an antiquated Oxford college of no real distinction (in the 1982 BBC television adaptation of Smiley's People, he refers to himself as a fellow of Lincoln College), studying modern languages with a particular focus on Baroque German literature. In July 1928, while considering post-graduate study in that field, he was recruited into the Circus by his tutor Jebedee.

Peter

Peter often is used to refer to Saint Peter, a disciple of Jesus Christ. It can also refer to many other people, of which only a few are listed here. This page only lists people commonly referred to as "Peter" and nothing else; for others, please see List of people named Peter.

People

Given name

Religion

Other people

Surname

Other uses