International calls to the USA

[dgw2020]

Hi, I saw the attached pic which purports to show GPO operators at Faraday connecting international calls to the USA. The board they are operating has the US style keypad and not a GPO dial.
The US utilised MF signalling on their long distance network from about the 1950s. The ops connected calls via tone keypads with a start and stop MF command.
This video shows it in operation. https://youtu.be/oPM_j7p7YnQ

My question is would this have been the same for GPO operators dealing with calls to the US? Did they select an international trunk into the US network and key out the area code and local number in a similar way to the US operators or was it something completely different?

Thanks!

[Graham G3ZVT]

Are you sure it's a US style one though?
I am no expert, but didn't some of our operators have a comptometer style keyboards for domestic traffic?

[198 kHz]

The headsets, chairs, and VIFs (Visual Index Files) look like GPO style.
The desks look more modern than the ones I worked on, but that was in a provincial GSC, not Faraday!

[dgw2020]

Originally Posted by rambo1152

Are you sure it's a US style one though?
I am no expert, but didn't some of our operators have a comptometer style keyboards for domestic traffic?

Pretty sure it's a US style keypad - if you look very carefully (and I've seen this in other pics) against the 6 key, there is a label advising this is letter O and not on 0 like it was on some UK dials.

I'm just interested that if these calls were set up with MF signalling, it was probably quicker to make an international call to the US than it was to call the trunk operator and for her to pulse dial across the GPO network, even with STD!