The real reason the BBC used faders opening towards the operator is entirely logical.
The early broadcast consoles, like this Type B desk, used rotary faders -- big knobs that you operated by rotating your wrist. They were fast and accurate, but you could only operate a maximum of two at a time.
This arrangement allows a lot of faders to be placed next to each other so that several could be operated with separate fingers, allowing multiple channels to be balanced simultaneously, and allowing far more channels to be controlled in a compact desk.
However, the fader knob obviously travels on an arc -- it goes up and over. Here is a Painton quadrant fader looking end on, with a BBC fader scale.
If that is installed into a flat console desktop, then the scale numbers on the side away from the operator (0-10) become invisible and so it's impossible to open the fader accurately to a particular mark because you can't see it.
But if the fader is configured to open towards the operator, it becomes very easy to open to a particular setting because that's marked on the side facing the operator.
Standard BBC practice was to use 23 (the scale goes up to 30) as the unity gain point on the fader. During rehearsals the operator would 'take levels' and note down the required fader setting on the script -- 20, 23, 27 or whatever it might need. During the recording/broadcast they would note the required value from their script for an upcoming source, place their thumb on the scale in the appropriate position, and be confident that they would open the fader to exactly the right mark every time. The up-and-over action also worked very well with the human wrist -- it is a very natural movement.
EMI also used Painton quadrant faders, but with a different scale and in the opposite direction. The scale had 'Out' at the near end (off) and went up to (I think) +20 at the far end, with ) at the unity mark.
Another nice feature of those Painton quadrant faders was that they could be fitted with lightbulbs at each end to illuminate the perspex cover. That could be used to indicate active channels or, when different colour bulbs were used, to indicate channel group routing (or other functions).
This was over forty years before Studer decided to 'invent' the idea of coloured fader slots to indicate channel routing etc, and patent it as 'FaderGlow'... (Now also seen on some Soundcraft digital consoles too)
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ooh! Spooky! 
