The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 was one of the news sensations of the century. But behind that familiar story lies another, untold tale worthy of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: a story of newspaper skulduggery in a foreign land, chequebook journalism, feuding, drunken hacks, secret codes and fantastic expenses claims. It is a story of archaeologists working underground to unearth the most beautiful and sacred treasures, while above ground journalists slugged it out in an unholy media scrum.

And it is a story, revealed in documents from the Times archives, in which this newspaper played the central role. The Times broke the news that Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon had found an intact royal tomb in Luxor on November 30, 1922, instigating what would now be called a media feeding frenzy across the globe.

Carter, the British Egyptologist who had been digging in the Valley of the Kings since 1914, became an overnight celebrity. “Next came our friends the newspaper correspondents, who flocked to The Valley in large numbers,” he wrote. “They certainly did their work with some thoroughness, for each owed it to himself and to his newspaper to get daily information.”

The stakes were raised still higher when The Times announced, in January 1923, that it had signed an exclusive deal with Lord Carnarvon, the wealthy amateur Egyptologist who had financed the expedition, to distribute all news and pictures from the tomb as its fabulous contents were gradually revealed. All the other newspapers could buy the same service at the same time and the Egyptian papers would receive the service free.

Rival newspapers, enraged at being denied independent access to an irresistible story, did what any sensible newspaper would do, then as now: they set out to spoil the Times exclusive in any way possible, setting off one of the most extraordinary – and hilarious – battles in Fleet Street history.

Today, in the age of Hello!-sponsored weddings, exclusivity pacts with newspapers are the norm; in 1923, the Times deal was almost unprecedented.

The Times was accused by its rivals of setting up a monopoly and Lord Carnarvon was condemned as a profiteer. Some newspapers agreed, reluctantly, to pay for the Times news service but a number refused and dispatched their hardened hacks to Luxor, apparently with instructions from their editors “to do everything possible to break the Times agreement” by getting the story first. It was the signal for all-out newspaper war.

The chief Times reporter in Luxor was Arthur Merton, its Cairo correspondent, who had broken news of the original discovery. The deal for exclusive rights was costing The Times £5,000 and 75 per cent of syndication profits, so to protect that investment the Editor decided to send out extra troops. The war correspondent Harry Perry Robinson, a bristling little man with an uncanny resemblance to Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army, was dispatched from London to organise matters, along with the paper’s head messenger, a burly First World War veteran named Harold Moyne, and a photographer, Herbert Warhurst.

Ranged against the Times team were some of Fleet Street’s finest: the travel writer H.V. Morton, reporting for the Daily Express; the Egyptologist Arthur Weigall, for the Daily Mail, and H.A. Bradstreet, special correspondent for the Morning Postand Hearst newspapers. Their ringleader was Valentine Williams, of Reuters, a writer of detective novels and another old hand who had reported from the trenches of the Western Front for the Daily Mail. He brought along his attractive wife as a not-very-secret weapon.

In early February 1923, all the reporters checked into the luxurious Winter Palace Hotel at Luxor and immediately began spying on one another. At first, relations between the Times team and the opposition – Merton dubbed them “the Combine” – were relatively civil. Matters swiftly deteriorated.

“Our rivals began to get restless at getting very little news,” Perry Robinson reported to the Editor of The Times. The Combine, he said, had “spent many hours at the tomb . . . in the hope of finding some channel of information”, but to no avail.

Frustrated at the news blackout and the stream of reports in The Times describing each new discovery, the Combine held a secret council of war in Morton’s hotel room, agreeing on more aggressive tactics. They began complaining to the Egyptian authorities, pooling information, and holding a series of champagne dinners for local Egyptian officials, hosted by Mrs Williams, in the hope of extracting some morsels of news.

Merton counterattacked: suspecting that bribed Egyptian postal clerks were intercepting his messages, he worked out an elaborate code for sending stories: the Daily Mailwas designated “Aeroplane”, Carter became “Ankor,” Carnarvon was “Séance”, and so on. He adopted a false name, informing the Editor in a separate telegram: “ARRANGE URGENTLY TELEGRAPHIC FACILITIES NAME GEORGE STYLIANOS. EVENT CERTAIN CONTINGENCIES DESPATCHES HENCEFORWARD MAY SOMETIMES BE SIGNED STYLIANOS.” The reference to contingencies meant interception by the enemy.

“Combine now getting rude, and not even a good morning for the Times staff,” reported Perry Robinson. A few days later, he bumped into some of his rivals in the street.

“Valentine Williams, who had apparently been busy champagne drinking, stopped me and wanted to know why I was following him about.” Perry Robinson shot back: “Don't be silly, as if The Times would follow you about or even care to know what you were doing; in fact, we have all the information about ‘Tut’ we require and it is hardly likely any information you have is of any use.” Then he stomped back to the hotel.

He reported back that “Williams was apparently frazzled” and had to be taken by Morton for a “night carriage ride” to sober up.

Despite the tension, the reporters were clearly having a whale of a time, behaving extremely childishly in pursuit of the best story on Earth and spending company money hand over fist. Indeed, the Times team would eventually rack up an impressive £3,500 in expenses, roughly equivalent to £137,000 today.

“The expenses are the devil,” Perry Robinson wrote cheerily to the paper’s manager, knowing that he could get away with anything. “The amount of money that goes in daily boat and donkey hire is horrid.” The manager replied: “I have absolute confidence in you carrying through the undertaking at minimal cost.” You can almost hear his gritted teeth.

Back in London, Fleet Street was giving The Times and Lord Carnarvon a drubbing from the moral high ground, the place it usually retreats to when one of its number obtains something the others all want. The Daily Express headlined a leading article denouncing the deal: “Tutankhamen Limited”. Carnarvon was depicted as “a person who, whilst posing as a single-minded archaeologist, has been careful to safeguard his own financial interests”.

The Times defended its actions by pointing out that if every journalist in the world had been allowed to trample through the tomb, “the work of Lord Carnarvon and his staff would have become impossible”.

In vain did Carnarvon point out that the money he was being paid by The Times was a fraction of what he had spent on the expedition. He found the media furore baffling. “Neither of us having much experience of Press sharks,” he wrote to Carter, “one is rather at a loss to know how to act for the best.”

In truth, Carnarvon had struck the exclusivity deal only because journalists kept phoning his wife in the middle of the night to demand updates. By selecting a single newspaper as a conduit he hoped “to secure a certain amount of peace” for himself and his family.

“I think probably the Daily Mail would give more [money],” he wrote. “But The Times is after all the first newspaper in the world.”

What Carnarvon had secured was very far from peace. On a brief visit to Britain, he found himself under fire from almost every paper except The Times. The good lord cheered himself up in the traditional aristocratic manner, by killing things in large numbers. He wrote to Carter: “I have had a very tiring and trying time since return, the papers are chief offenders. However, I killed 1,700 head, nearly all rabbits, & 500 the next day.”

Britain, he noted, was in the grip of a Tutankhamun craze: “It is a very curious thing how this discovery has excited the public, all the most unlikely people, from the King down to the policeman, taxi driver and common labourer . . . a poor artisan wrote offering me £5 towards costs.”

Back in Luxor, relations between the two sides of the press pack grew steadily worse. Bradstreet of the Morning Post, deprived of any substance to report, sent long, colourful and largely fanciful descriptions of what he imagined might be going on inside the tomb.

Asked to match this, Merton of The Times fired off an irate telegram: “POST CORRESPONDENT WHO JUSTIFY EXISTENCE EXAGGERATES DISTORTS INVENTS STOP EYE [sic] CAN PROVIDE SIMILAR COLOUR BUT FEEL UNDIGNIFIED FOLLOW POST UNWORTHY LEAD.”

Barely able to conceal his mirth, Perry Robinson reported to his Times bosses that the opposition was going to ever greater lengths in the search for news: “Mrs Valentine Williams was caught looking over Mr Merton’s shoulder, looking at his writing pad. Merton, noticing this, wrote on his pad, ‘It is unladylike and rude to look over my shoulder’ – exit Mrs Valentine Williams.”

On February 17, 1923, the day secretly set for penetrating the inner chamber containing the sarcophagus, the Combine got wind that something important was afoot: “It was apparent to everybody that some opening would be made.”

By 8.45am the entire rival press pack was already sitting on the parapet over the tomb, where they would remain, like vultures in the Egyptian sun, for the next eight hours, getting increasingly hot and irritable. To throw them off the scent, The Times flung out a red herring. As Perry Robinson reported, “one of the native workers collared by the Combine during the afternoon said eight mummies had been found, and another said three mummies had been found”.

This was, of course, quite untrue, but it set the rumour mill grinding frantically. Several local papers reported the next day that more than one mummy had been unearthed.

“This spurious information specially sent out by Mr Carter as a blind confused our rivals very much,” yet the Fleet Street veterans on the outside were not to be fooled so easily. By mid-afternoon it was clear, simply from the excited comings and goings at the tomb, that an important discovery had been made.

“An Egyptian official must have given them a hazy description of the inner chamber,” reported Perry Robinson.

In fact, in time-honoured Fleet Street fashion, Williams of Reuters had quietly intercepted a workman who had emerged briefly to relieve himself, obtained confirmation that the tomb had indeed been opened, and slipped off to send his story without telling his colleagues. He sent a cable announcing that the burial chamber had been penetrated in time to catch an evening newspaper in Britain and thus scooped The Times with the headline, if not the detail, of what had happened.

By that time, the Times correspondents had already wired over an official report to London for distribution, describing the three gilded shrines guarding Tutankhamun’s granite sarcophagus. But the Combine still had no specific information about the contents of the inner chamber.

“All the Press got back to the hotel at 5.30pm and from then until 11 o’clock at night were busy chasing to and fro gleaning any information that might be overheard over dinner.” Once again, Mrs Valentine Williams was to the fore, chatting up the representative of the Egyptian press in the hope of extracting something useful. “She cornered him and even squeezed his hand,” the Times man noted with disapproval.

It was one thing to pay for news but quite another to go around squeezing Egyptians to get it.

Perry Robinson was triumphant: “It was not until after 8.30 that the Combine had got some sort of news to put together and were at the Railway Station as late as 11pm cabling home, whereas I brought the first story from the Tomb at midday.”

The full account appeared in The Times, and those papers that had paid for its service, the next morning: “Opening of the Tomb. Seals Broken. A Magnificent Spectacle. Whatever anyone may have guessed or imagined of the secret of Tutankhamen’s [sic] tomb, they surely cannot have dreamed the truth as now revealed . . .”

The newspapers arrived in Luxor two days later but the Times men did not manage to read their own words in print: in a final act of pique, Bradstreet of Fleet Street had apparently stolen all the newspapers from the hotel in the early hours and stormed back to Cairo.

Back at the Timesoffices in London, the episode was hailed as a triumph. The paper’s syndication service would end up with an overall loss of £2,500, and its journalists would set an eye-popping record for expenditure on “donkeys” that has never been equalled. But The Times had stuffed the opposition, and that was all that mattered. The circulation rocketed.

“I cannot recall a great news occasion on which the Daily Mail has been so completely beaten,” chortled the day editor, in a three-page letter of congratulations to Perry Robinson and his team. “You have secured a very great triumph for The Times.

“It is clear that you have had almost unbelievable difficulties, and your complete success is all the more astonishing. There is no doubt about it at all. The opposition has been overwhelmed and the battle for the Times-Carnarvon agreement has been won.”

Carter and Carnarvon had discovered perhaps the greatest treasure trove of all time; the world had discovered a craze for Egyptology that has never abated; and Fleet Street had discovered the art of the news exclusive, the supreme power of the orchestrated scoop.

As Corker, the veteran journalist in Waugh’s Scoop, observes sagely: “We’re paid to supply news. If someone else has sent a story before us, our story isn’t news.”

The Times had not only supplied news of a breathtaking discovery, it had supplied the news for everyone else and stopped its rivals from getting the full story first.

Much has changed since 1923 but the ferocious spirit of Fleet Street competition, like the treasures of Tutankhamun, have been lovingly preserved ever since.

— Howard Carter, the Egyptologist who had been digging in the Valley of the Kings, wrote: “Next came our friends the newspaper correspondents, who flocked to the Valley in large numbers. They certainly did their work with some thoroughness, for each owed it to himself and to his newspaper to get daily information”

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