unable to read RS232 output on Arduino mega with MAX232 shield
I have solved the above and will share the answer as it may be of help to others:

As the Tx indicator LED on the RS232 shield would not light up when connected to the sensor, I checked the voltage difference between pin 2 (Tx) and pin 5 (GND) of the RS232 connector. This turned out to be only 5V, indicating that the protocol used is TTL-RS232 rather than 'true' RS232. 

Due to the low voltage, I have connected the RS232 Tx and GND pins directly to the Arduino. With Tx connected to digital port 10, I used the SoftwareSerial library with logic inversion to read the data: SoftwareSerial mySerial(10, 11, 1). 

This works!