Evan Williams has been sentenced to three years in prison after a conviction last month for causing grievous bodily harm with intent. The court heard he attacked 72-year-old Martin Dandridge after mistakenly believing he was a lamper, a type of poacher, one evening in December 2024—an incident that left Dandridge with a broken arm.
It didn’t take long for the judge to make the tone clear. “This was an appalling offence, causing serious injury,” Recorder Angharad Price told Williams as she delivered the sentence on Tuesday morning at Cardiff Crown Court. “It is never acceptable to take the law into your own hands.”
For Williams, though, the punishment isn’t the only uncertainty. In court, his barrister David Elias KC said the future of Williams’ training business is now in doubt, pointing to the basic problem: if Williams isn’t there, there isn’t a business. The issue of who could step in—at least on paper—has become tangled with what the court heard about the licence.
Williams’ licence was transferred after his conviction into the name of his wife, Cath, but Elias cast doubt on whether she would continue in charge. “It doesn’t matter in whose name the licence is,” Elias said, as part of a plea to the judge to impose only a suspended sentence. “It is Evan Williams who brings the racing knowledge and no one else.” Actually, that line landed pretty hard—because it’s not just about paperwork, it’s about whether the operation can function without him.
As part of his mitigation, Elias leaned heavily on character and support. He described “an unprecedented number of testimonials,” with 570 character references having been received by Williams’ solicitors, and more still continuing to arrive. Some 102 of those references had been submitted to the court and read by the judge in advance of Tuesday’s hearing.
The courtroom atmosphere, at least from what people close to cases like this tend to describe, is usually a mix of formality and tension—maybe even that dry rustle of paperwork as readings are finished. Here, the readings were only one piece of a wider narrative the judge ultimately chose not to soften. And while the story is being updated and more news is expected to follow shortly, the core facts are already set: a conviction, a three-year sentence, and a business now looking at what happens next when the central figure is gone.
This is being watched closely not just because of the prison term itself, but because it may ripple outward into how racing operations handle sudden disruptions. There are also earlier related developments tied to Williams—reports of a dog walker assault case and coverage of his licence transfer by his wife after that conviction—details Misryoum newsroom reporting has already been following as the week’s events unfolded. For now, the question remains: what can continue, and what can’t, once the decision has been handed down.
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