Unit tests throw segmentation fault

Looks like somehow the std::cout or std::cerr got set to NULL. I note there is some blobs of code which massages the output buffers to shut up noisy tests. This is handled on a per-test basis. and somewhere I think something went wrong. I would do this as a test fixture allowing code to be implemented once per test. Nb test fixtures docs are in here:

https://github.com/google/googletest/blob/master/googletest/docs/Primer.md