Ah ha, I figured it out on the train this morning (more by luck )
The ambient setting for the blinn was right at the bottom and by moving it up a little it brought out the texturing on a quick render.
Dont know whether this is the real reason why it didnt show but its working now

Thanks for the suggestions

p.s, here's the tutorial I was going though (skip straight down to step 4). It seems good as it is fairly basic:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Render_..._Model_in_Maya