I would imagine that the operator just needed to record the information necessary (destination plus length of call) for later calculation of the charge for the call, so that they could move on to the next call as quickly as possible.
As I said, these would be for calls originating from Oxford, and I imagine that the destinations listed were the only ones my mother dealt with. Perhaps calls to other destinations needed to be pre-booked.
My understanding is that getting married, and particularly having children, put an end to a telephonist's career in those days, which would put my mother's time at the switchboard into the late 1930s into the start of WWII at the latest.[/QUOTE]
Clerical Assistants worked out the call charges from the info on the 'tickets'.
When I joined the GPO as an apprentice way back (there were still over a thousand public exchanges which were still manual!) there were few married operators. The supervisors were the ones that don't get 'hitched' .
As an apprentice, we had into go into the manual switchroom at Chester at 8am to repair the faulty cords at the male night staff were going off duty and before the day 'girls' came on duty. One of the supervisors was about four foot nothing and seemed well over ninety to me a mere 16 year old. Another - Miss xxxxxx - actually had a beard !!
Boy, were they 'dragons' towards the girls?
The BBC TV series of 1996/8
'The Hello Girls' about the life and loves of the GPO operators at the auto-manual board at Derby exchange in 1959 got pretty near! Most episodes are on You Tube but make sure you search for 'BBC The Hello Girls You Tube' otherwise you'll get some interesting links
