[4] There was a later suggestion that, in addition to running the madhouse, Betty Potter kept "a common boarding house, on Bethnal Green" and that their son Christopher "usually" ran "Errands, for" his "Mother's Boarders, for hire.
[6] Following his father's death in October 1771 it appears that Christopher sold his interest in the madhouse to Stratton but retained his partnership in the Archel dye factory.
[9] His Bethnal Green house was put up for sale in July 1778[10] but by then the family had already moved to their new home, Great Barns, an estate near Ely, Cambridgeshire,[11] nine hundred acres of which he devoted to growing woad.
[18] In 1783, at the end of the war, Potter set up a chain of bakeries in London to supply the city with cheap bread,[19] much to the consternation of the Baker's Company.
[23] Settling in Paris, Potter in 1789 established potteries there, and assumed credit for the introduction of transfer printing on porcelain and glass to France, acknowledging that the discovery of the technique had been made in England some 20 years before.
[24] Backed by a favourable report from two members of the Academy of Sciences and by Sylvan Bailly, the mayor of Paris, he petitioned the National Assembly for a seven years' patent, promising to give a fourth of the profits to the poor, and to teach his process to French apprentices.
He also reopened the Chantilly porcelain works, which had been closed through the emigration of the Condé family; he there employed five hundred men, and produced nine thousand dozen plates a month.
In 1811 he advocated the cultivation of woad in France, citing his Cambridgeshire experience, and between 1794 and 1812 he took out five patents for agricultural and manufacturing processes, some of them in association with his son, Thomas Mille Potter.
[12] In March 1815, when Napoleon Bonaparte returned from the island of Elba, Potter, already weakened by age and infirmities, wanted to leave France temporarily.
[26] His eldest son Thomas Mills Potter, with whom he had collaborated on his later French patents, died on 19 December 1815 at Nonsuch Park, the home of their family friend Samuel Farmer.
[12] He was buried at St Matthew's, Bethnal Green on 24 November 1817[29] Obituaries noted that 'he could calculate by memory alone with a promptitude that astonished the beholder, and at the same time with a degree of precision, that could only be equalled by the slow and painful operations of the counting-house'[30] and 'He possessed an extensive memory .... His researches in mechanical and chemical science, if not profound, rendered the common powers of both prompt and useful for various purposes to which he skilfully applied them.