It’s not bakelite but injection moulded and I could have sworn it was Swedish. Definitely not British. There are nuanced differences.
https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/statens-...
In some country I have seen reverse coding, i.e. increasing number dialled gave decreasing number of pulses. Maybe Norway???
Big endian vs. little endian is not something new that came with digital computers :)
Edit: Only Oslo (different from the rest of Norway) and New Zealand had the inverted coding.
If the phone was for connecting the sub to landlines, sure, otherwise, who knows?