Many thanks Dumitru,
I have resolved the issue.
Firstly I disabled all plugins and tested and the images worked as I would expect.
I then reenabled each plugin one by one and testing after each was enabled to try to isolate the culprit.
I found that the “offender” was the FPW Category Thumbnails plugin.
Next was to have a look at the settings and sure enough there was a setting to override it’s default behaviour. “Do not overwrite if post/page has thumbnail assigned already”. So I have selected that option and now all seems well.
Kind regards,
Frank