vSphere 5.1 Web Client US date locale

After recently upgrading my lab from 5.0 to 5.1 I was keen to start playing around with the new Web Interface Client since the thick GUI client might not be around for too much longer.  I'm not using the vCenter appliance so vCenter is installed on a Windows 2008 R2 server.  After stumbling through I noticed that when viewing tasks and events date format was showing US format of MM/DD/YYYY rather than the UK of DD/MM/YYYY:

Thinking this was simply that my windows locale was set to US I double checked but as expected it was showing correctly as United Kingdom.  This was for both the account that I was logged on as and the account the vCenter service was started with.  When checking the same events in the thick GUI client the format is showing correctly:

After a twitter conversation with Graham French the issue could be with a tomcat config file that could potentially be set to a US locale somewhere.  I've trawled both Google and the VMware KB site for anything referencing this and have so far came up with nothing.  I've checked as many config files as I can but just can't seem to find anything relating to this.  If anyone can shed any light on this I'd be much appreciated.

Update 18/01/2013

I spent countless hours looking through log files to try and find the default locale and then I suddenly remembered a KB article I read a while back about changing the language in the web client.  It then suddenly dawned on me that I should try the following:

https://<vCenterServer>:9443/vsphere-client/?locale=en_GB

hey presto: