Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned May twentynine stop awaiting improvement stop all well.” The message may sound like the announcement of failure. In fact, it was an elaborate journalistic code, worked out by The Times in 1953, to convey exactly the opposite message. When decrypted, the message read: “Everest Climbed Hillary Tenzing May 29”.

The message had been sent by a 27-year-old Times sub-editor, James (now Jan) Morris, the only journalist to accompany the 1953 expedition. From base camp, it was taken by runner to a police post with a radio transmitter 30 miles (48 km) down the mountain at Namche, from where it was transmitted to Kathmandu. From there the British Embassy wired it to London. It reached The Times at 4.14 pm on June 1. The news of the first ascent of Everest duly appeared in The Times on June 2, 1953, the day of Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation.

Conquering Everest was an astonishing human achievement, but on a lesser scale, it also represented a remarkable journalistic coup, an unparalleled scoop involving personal courage, ingenuity and some extremely canny journalistic plotting. The 1953 expedition was, in part, sponsored by The Times, which obtained exclusive rights of publication in return for a fee. The newspaper had been associated in the same way with earlier attempts to scale the peak, including George Mallory’s ill-fated attempt in 1924.

Morris, the Times journalist selected to accompany the expedition as special correspondent, was a former soldier and intelligence officer who was working as a sub-editor on the foreign news desk. Morris, needless to say, was thrilled to be offered the journalistic break of a lifetime. “I wish that Morris didn’t look quite so pleased,” the foreign editor had remarked.

Jan Morris

“I think I was selected because everyone else was about 80 years old,” Jan Morris said on Friday from her home in Wales. “I was young and fit, and really very ambitious.”

Although The Times had secured exclusive reporting rights, other newspapers and reporters, inevitably, were on the scent, most notably Ralph Izzard of The Daily Mail and Colin Reid of The Daily Telegraph. Both had travelled to Kathmandu, with instructions to intercept the news, if possible, and spoil The Times’s scoop. Competition for the story, Morris predicted, would be “ruthless and unremitting”.

The nearest telephone to the summit was 180 miles away, so getting the news back to London would require elaborate planning; carrier pigeons were considered, as was lighting a fire beacon on the mountain, or floating a message in a watertight container down a river into India. None was considered reliable.

On his arrival, Morris discovered that the Indian Government had set up a small police post (to keep an eye on communist Tibet) at Namche with a radio link to Kathmandu. This would clearly be the quickest way to relay the news. Rival journalists, however, had come equipped with powerful wireless receivers, and there was a danger that the messages might be intercepted, or even that they might somehow bribe the local radio operators to get The Times’s report.

It was decided to draw up a code, similar to those used during the war, in which the message of success could be concealed within one of failure. If Morris wired “South Col Untenable”, for example, that would mean George Band had made the ascent; if the message said: “Awaiting improvement”, that signified Tenzing had made the successful ascent, and so on. “Snow condition bad” indicated success.

Before the final assault, Morris sent regular reports by runner with rewards on a sliding scale: £10 if the journey was completed in eight days, but £30 if the runner achieved it in six. In The Times house journal, Morris, who would change sex in 1972 and achieve huge fame as the writer Jan Morris, gave an account of the journey, describing the oversized insects and meals of “snowman pie”: chopped yak meat embedded in mashed potato. “Excellent if indigestible”.

On May 30, Morris was with the climbing party at Camp IV, at an altitude of 22,100 ft, anxiously awaiting news of the two men, Hillary and Tenzing, who made the final assault. Morris later described the wait as “a decidedly pre-dentist feeling”. When Hillary and Tenzing finally appeared at 2.30 pm the expedition leader John Hunt recorded: “When we realised by their unmistakable gestures that they had been to the top, we temporarily went mad.”

“It was a moment so thrilling, so vibrant, that the hot tears sprang to the eyes of most of us,” wrote Morris. But there was little time for celebration, for Morris was on a strict deadline. “In a moment of wild optimism,” Morris reflected, “The Times could conceivably print the news on the very day of Queen Elizabeth's coronation.”

Morris sat with Edmund Hillary in his tent (the great climber would later become godfather to one of Morris’s sons) while the conqueror of Everest ate an omelette and described the experience.

“Edmund Hillary was a really good man,” Jan Morris said. “His life had such a wonderful shape. It was a colossal life, and a moral life, that had at its core a lifelong obligation to the Sherpa people.”

The young reporter then set off down the mountain, accompanied by the mountaineer Michael Westmacott. “We stumbled and slithered our way through the ice blocks,” he wrote. “The dark was coming on and I was fairly exhausted, often losing my footing on the crumbly ice, getting entangled with the rope, or tottering on the brinks of crevasses.”

History does not record whether any of The Times’s rivals managed to intercept the message and believed it to be as non-newsworthy as it seemed.

In London it was decided that the Queen-to-be could be informed ahead of publication, on the eve of her coronation. The next day, The Times described the feat as “a tribute of glory” to the new Queen.

Under normal circumstances such a scoop would have been kept back until later editions, to prevent other newspapers from copying it, but the fact that Everest had been finally conquered was so momentous it was decided all Times readers should know about it. Morris’s despatch ran through all editions.

Back on the slopes of Everest, Morris first discovered that the ruse had worked and his message had got through safely, and exclusively, when he heard the news on the BBC World Service. Hillary remarked of his achievement: “Well, we knocked the bastard off.”

Morris was more lyrical. His triumphant article in The Times on June 2 concluded with a celebratory paean to more than 16 men who had previously died attempting to climb Everest.

“Today, high above the rugged Nuptse ridge, Everest looks as surly, as muscular, as scornfully unattainable as ever: but after 30 years of endeavour the greatest of mountains is defeated, and many are the ghosts and men far off who share the triumph.”

The Times, London