In 1917, Henry Wilson and members of the Arts and Crafts Movement began a campaign for the provision of handicraft training for disabled veterans. They argued that handicraft work would be an ideal form of therapy for men with disabilities and, most importantly, would lead to meaningful employment. The following year, the government appointed Wilson and some of his associates to a committee that would advise it on this subject. In this capacity, they proposed, reviewed and endorsed government funding for a number of handicraft training schemes. This article examines their activities and the reasons why their well-intentioned schemes failed. In particular, I examine George Frampton’s proposal to train disabled veterans so that they might earn a living weaving tapestries as war memorials. It is my contention that this episode further illustrates the ways in which disabled veterans were adversely affected by the post-war politics of social reconstruction. They faced a government committed to financial retrenchment after the war and encountered private groups with their own agenda. While Wilson and his associates were motivated by a genuine desire to aid men disabled by the war, their overriding ambition was to revive the handicraft tradition in Britain. Circumstances in post-World War I Britain were not conducive for this development or for significant government expenditure on their laudable, but expensive and impractical, schemes. In the end, disabled veterans in search of a ‘job fit for heroes’ were caught in the middle of the competing agendas of the state and these well-meaning members of the public.