Re the Vulcan crash; I'm not sure how positional information of the aircraft was presented to the controller on these earlier GCA systems but mention of 'trackers' would indicate it was similar to the system described by Arthur C. Clarke in his autobiographical novel 'Glidepath' whereby the trackers track the aircraft using 3 'A scopes' and the controller reads the position of the aircraft from a series of dials rather than looking at a radar display as with PAR. I once had an 'Eagle Book of Aircraft' dating from the early '50s which I remember showed a photo of the 'GCA' at Heathrow and did indeed show a picture of an 'A scope'.
With this type of approach, to this day, the pilot puts his full trust in the talkdown controller hence the 'calm and unhurried' nature of the talkdown, certainly I always tried to do it this way.