I have reflashed the SD card just in case and completed the setup. The RTC is being recognised. I let the Pi synch time via the internet and then "sudo hwclock -w" to write the time. "sudo hwclock -r" shows the correct time.
When i restart it still defaults back to Fri Feb 12, 02:28!!!!!
Is there some other clock set or some kind of override in the config that is looking at some kind of pretend hwclock?
After some more searching I have also run:
sudo apt-get -y remove fake-hwclock - this fails as it says fake-hwclock is not installed
sudo update-rc.d -f fake-hwclock remove
sudo systemctl disable fake-hwclock