I promised Sachin I would provide the feedback and so I did. As mentioned before I had not used gradle before Beam so it's also quite possible that this is a problem between keyboard and chair and that I simply misunderstood something early on in the (quite lengthy) instruction set. That being said, I *was* surprised that Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS had such an old version of gradle installed and when I updated it everything started to work as advertised.
Thanks for caring! Matt
