Horse trainer convicted after attacking dog walker in mistaken poaching scare

Martin Dandridge was left with fractures to his left forearm and lasting pain after Evan Williams struck him with a hockey stick on his land in Llancarfan, Vale of Glamorgan. The 72-year-old said the attack made him fear he was going to die, and he has since described ongoing pain in his forearm, persistent distress and a sense that he is “no longer the same person” he was before.

The confrontation began on the evening of 4 December 2024, when Dandridge was walking his cockerpoo, Gulliver, near a holiday cottage where he was staying with his wife. He wore a head torch and had a light on the dog so they could be seen in the dark, but Williams, identified in court as Richard Evan Rhys Williams and known widely as Evan Williams, said he believed he had spotted a lamper or poacher after lights were seen on the land. Williams drove towards Dandridge in a 4x4 with jockey Conor Ring beside him, passing two police officers on rural crime patrol on the way.

Dandridge told the jury he was repeatedly hit and that the blow to his arm was violent. Police took him to hospital, where doctors found fractures to his left forearm. Williams denied causing grievous bodily harm with intent and argued that Dandridge had injured himself after falling or being pulled by the dog into rough ground and a drainage hole, but a jury at Cardiff Crown Court unanimously convicted him after about 90 minutes of deliberation in March 2026.

Recorder Angharad Price told Williams that he had a choice to call the police and that taking the law into his own hands was unacceptable, although she accepted that an earlier trespass incident had been frightening. Six weeks before the attack, Williams had confronted trespassers who threatened to shoot him and burn down his farm, a background that sharpened the dispute over whether fear had spilled into violence.

Williams was sentenced to three years in prison on 14 April 2026. Dandridge is challenging that term as “unduly lenient” through official channels, turning the case into more than a rural assault conviction: it has become a test of how public standing can shape reactions to violent crime when the defendant is a prominent figure, one who has led the Welsh trainers’ championship for 11 seasons, won at the Cheltenham Festival and trained Secret Reprieve to the rearranged Welsh Grand National at Chepstow in 2020.