Default character encoding in Gnome Terminal

[Sebastian Tennant <sebyte smolny plus com>]

I asked this question a few weeks ago, so apologies for repeating
myself but it's still bugging me like mad...

Does anyone know how to set the default character encoding in Gnome
Terminal?  At the moment it defaults to:

  'Current locale - (ANSI_X3.4-1968)'

which has nothing to do with my environment/locale.

For instance, in a newly opened terminal:

  dellboy:~$ locale
  LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
  LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
  LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8
  dellboy:~$ cat /etc/environment
  en_GB.UTF-8
  dellboy:~$

You can't get much more utf-8 than that, and what is the character
encoding of this terminal?  Yup, you guessed it... 

If you don't know what I have to do, but you do know of a better place
for me to ask this question, that information would be much
appreciated too.

sdt