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Fascinating, I never knew that. Seems like the UK GPO sold or licensed handsets overseas too, which I also didn't know. From your link 1, they appear to have us

• thombat 7y ago
  That 746 photo certainly looks identical to the standard NZ unit, right down to the removable cover in the centre-top (which in big fancy offices was host to an extra switch for some kind of PABX function [possibly just a safer cradle-rest-tap for transferring calls?]. These switches were long rectangles and usually made of clear plastic like a small version of HAL9000's logic blocks - in the days before the BT phone jack reached NZ (around 1987) it was as exotic as anyone's phone could get - we used to salivate over UK electronic magazines and the riot of innovation on display: not just alternative handsets but even directly connected modems rather than acoustic couplers.
  • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Aye that switch sounds identical too. There was also some sort of extra switch set that was like a matching base, with 3 or 4 extra switches, that I only ever saw in a movie or two. Both illustrated on that Wikipedia page. Exotic was the arrival of the phone plug. Two phone points in the house and a push button phone, which usually still had a bell. The peak of 80s luxury. By the 90s I wanted a second line as the USRobotics Courier thing was always hogging the phone. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPO_telephones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPO_telephones