Programmatically (via php code) create content of a specified type
Thanks Ivan Jaros and Kevin ... Once I placed the machine name of the content type (rather than it's human readable title) as the type value the content created successful and was of the required type e.g.

$node = Node::create([
    'type'        =&gt; 'the machine name associated with the content type',
    'title'       =&gt; 'My title',
   ]);
 $node-&gt;save();