Daily Life History

Daily life in Bochum during the late 19th century

A grounded look at a central Ruhr city where coal mines, the Bochumer Verein steel works, railway streets, migrant households, shops, churches, and worker routines shaped everyday life.

Here, the late 19th century means approximately 1871–1900, when Bochum was a Prussian city in the province of Westphalia. This is the municipality of the time, not all the districts that form Bochum today. Its recorded population rose from 21,193 in 1871 to about 65,000 in 1900; Bochum passed 100,000 only after surrounding communities were incorporated in 1904–05.[1][2] Coal mining and cast-steel production drove much of this growth. Jacob Mayer established a cast-steel works beside the road to Essen in 1843; after new investment it became the Bochumer Verein für Bergbau und Gußstahlfabrikation in 1854.[1]

Bochum belonged to the same industrial landscape as Essen in the late 19th century and Dortmund in the late 19th century, but mines, the Bochumer Verein, smaller metal and machine works, railways, shops, farms, and the older market town remained interspersed. Industrial growth was not a single advance from village to metropolis: the depression after 1873 brought layoffs, short time, wage cuts, and an abrupt fall in housebuilding, while expansion resumed in the 1880s.[2][3] Place of work and affordable rent therefore mattered greatly to daily routes, especially before the first tram opened in 1894.

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing evidence is unusually specific but must be read critically. Mayor Carl Lange's 1886 report counted 2,290 residential buildings, 7,607 private households, and 1,274 people in thirteen collective institutions in the 1885 census. He said that workers' dwellings in the city usually had two or three heatable rooms, one also used for cooking, but admitted that Bochum had no detailed survey of room types. The same report recorded 330 people in fifty households in six houses in one densely occupied workers' district.[3] Lange was describing a serious public question while also defending his administration; his averages and favorable descriptions cannot stand for every room, attic, or lodging.

Construction followed the industrial cycle rather than population need. Lange's figures record 244 new houses in 1873 but only two in each year from 1879 through 1881; of 1,090 houses completed between 1870 and 1885, he classified only 102 as built exclusively for workers' families. His categories omit many mixed and converted buildings, yet the pattern explains why rising population could produce crowding even while middle-class accommodation remained available.[3] Private landlords, owner-occupiers, industrial companies, and the municipality supplied different pieces of the housing stock, so “workers' housing” was never one building type.

Company housing offered a distinct, limited alternative. By 1886 the Bochumer Verein's Stahlhausen colony contained 397 family dwellings occupied by 2,173 people. Plans ranged from two-room units to larger dwellings with cellar or attic storage, a small garden, and sometimes a stall. The earliest surviving type divided a cross-shaped brick building into four dwellings with separate entrances; later houses had three or four rooms.[3][4] These homes helped the company retain a settled core workforce, and tenancy also increased dependence on the employer. They housed only a minority of employees: many other families rented privately in the old center, the Griesenbruch, and districts near mines and workshops.

Single men faced different arrangements. The Bochumer Verein's Kost- und Logierhaus, opened in 1874, was designed for about 1,200 residents in 150 rooms and combined lodging with midday and evening meals. Rules governing drink, visitors, and movement extended factory discipline beyond the gate.[2][3] Private lodging was also important. Three miner-built houses at Am Rübenkamp in Hordel illustrate one arrangement: an 1897 directory records about ten tenants in each house, while attic rooms could be sublet to single miners. Stables and substantial gardens added food-producing work, generally performed by women.[5] This documented group is an example, not a model for every Bochum household.

Food and Daily Meals

No surviving Bochum source consulted for this page yields a universal workers' menu. Local market series do show why wages and prices mattered: rye, wheat, potatoes, pork, and beef were among the foods whose prices were tracked, and some rose before the 1889 strike even while pork and beef became cheaper.[2] Bread and potatoes were important working-class staples, but household purchases varied with earnings, family size, origin, gardens, and whether work was steady. A miner, a single steelworker in company lodging, a domestic servant eating in an employer's home, and a prosperous shopkeeper did not share one meal pattern.

The 1886 report gives a rare institutional menu. For a daily charge, residents of the Bochumer Verein lodging house received accommodation and two meals: the mayor described soup, vegetables, and meat at midday, then potatoes with sauce and meat in the evening. Because this was a municipal description of an employer institution, including claims about generous portions and low prices, it is evidence for what the institution advertised or supplied—not proof of what families across Bochum ate.[3] The company also operated a consumer store in Stahlhausen, while bakers, butchers, brewers, grocers, market sellers, and taverns served the wider city.[2]

In family homes, obtaining food could involve buying in small quantities, tending a garden or animals where the tenancy allowed, carrying provisions, and fitting cooking around shifts. Fuel and water constrained those routines. Bochum had opened a gasworks in 1855 and a waterworks in 1871, but those dates do not demonstrate a connection in every building.[1] A stove or range still had to be fueled and cleaned, water carried within or to the dwelling, and food stored without mechanical refrigeration. Such work fell largely to women and girls under contemporary household arrangements, even though censuses recorded unpaid and informal labor poorly.

Work and Labor

Work in Bochum centered on coal, steel, metalworking, machine building, construction, transport, and the services required by a fast-growing city. The Bochumer Verein made cast-steel wheels, bells, railway and mining equipment, and other heavy products.[1][2] Mines stood both within the municipality and in then-separate neighboring communities. Zeche Hannover, begun at Hordel in 1857 and purchased by Krupp in 1872, shows the scale and technical direction of deep mining. In 1877 its director Friedrich Koepe first used a friction pulley rather than winding the whole rope onto a drum, a system better suited to deeper shafts and heavy loads.[6]

Tasks and security differed sharply. Underground crews cut coal, drove headings, timbered roofs, loaded and moved tubs, maintained ventilation and drainage, and worked with surface enginemen, smiths, carpenters, sorters, and transport workers. At the steelworks, puddlers, melters, molders, rollers, machinists, fitters, laborers, foremen, and clerks occupied different positions in a linked process. Heavy industry provided relatively little direct employment for women. Domestic service was much more important, alongside sewing, laundry, retail, food trades, lodging, and unpaid household production; these activities were easily missed or minimized by occupational statistics.[2] At the Bochumer Verein in 1887, only 86 of 3,235 employees were under sixteen, a reminder that children's errands and household work should not automatically be described as factory employment.[2]

Mine work combined physical danger with close discipline. Although it predates this article's period by eight years, a surviving 1863 work regulation for Zeche Hannover documents a disciplinary system already in place: it required employment papers, a roll-call before descent, obedience to supervisors, and compliance with safety and conduct rules. The document shows what owners demanded, not that every shift followed the rules or that the rules remained unchanged.[7] Wage cuts, short time, dismissals, fines, and disputes over hours and dignity encouraged job-changing, absenteeism, and strikes. In May 1889, pits in and around Bochum including Dannenbaum, Julius Philipp, Prinz Regent, Hannover, and Präsident joined the mass Ruhr miners' strike.[2] The opening of Bergmannsheil in 1890 specifically to treat injured miners, followed by a rehabilitation institute in 1892 and an X-ray cabinet in 1896, also makes the everyday risk of industrial injury visible.[8]

Social Structure

Bochum's late 19th-century society was layered by property, occupation, skill, confession, gender, age, neighborhood, and origin. Industrial owners and senior managers exercised great influence, but older merchants, master artisans, property owners, lawyers, doctors, clergy, engineers, teachers, and municipal officials did not simply disappear. Workers were also internally differentiated: a skilled molder, long-serving miner, foreman, casual laborer, servant, or recently arrived unskilled factory worker had different bargaining power and prospects. Home ownership and movement into clerical or supervisory work were possible for some, but neither was a general working-class trajectory.[2]

Migration was substantial but not uniform. Work drew people first from Westphalia, Hesse, and the Rhineland and increasingly from East and West Prussia, Posen, Silesia, and Masuria. Many Polish-speaking arrivals were Prussian citizens moving within the German Empire, not immigrants across an international border. The Bochumer Verein's records contain Slavic names by 1872–73, and workers identified as Polish made up 11.7 percent of its workforce in 1889.[9] Bochum also became a center of Polish Catholic and associational life: Józef Szotowski arrived as a chaplain in 1884, and Franciszek Liss founded the Polish-language Wiarus Polski in the city in 1890.[9] These institutions helped newcomers while also drawing scrutiny and discrimination from German authorities and neighbors.

Gender and age shaped household authority and what the records make visible. A regular male wage mattered greatly in a heavy-industry city with few industrial jobs for women, yet women managed budgets, cooking, washing, gardens, animals, children, illness, and lodgers and might also earn through service, sewing, laundry, retail, or food work. A trade-union newspaper printed in Bochum in 1899 described miners' wives carrying water and cooking to work schedules, using examples from both rural and urban parts of the wider coalfield. Its campaigning voice exposes hardship but is not a neutral survey of Bochum households.[10] Children moved between schooling, errands, sibling care, apprenticeships, and, especially in later adolescence, wages. Family form, age, income, and access to kin therefore mattered more than a single breadwinner model suggests.

Age was a citywide material fact, not just a family matter: the municipal chronology reports that 40 percent of Bochum's population was under fifteen in 1880.[1] This unusually young population increased demand for rooms, food, care, schools, and later apprenticeships and jobs. It also meant that streets, courtyards, churches, and worker settlements were occupied by many children whose labor appears imperfectly in formal employment figures. The statistic does not show how childhood differed by income, confession, household origin, disability, or whether a parent had steady work.

Tools and Technology

Technology was a system of tools, skills, and maintenance rather than a parade of inventions. At Zeche Hannover the Koepe pulley linked a steam winding engine, rope, two cages, and an under-rope: as one cage rose, the other descended. The surviving 1893 winding engine and masonry tower show surface machinery, while regulations and crew records reveal the people required to operate it.[6][7] Picks, shovels, tubs, timber supports, pumps, ventilation, lamps, and repair shops remained essential underground. At the Bochumer Verein, furnaces, molds, rolling and machine tools, cranes, gauges, and railway sidings similarly depended on coordinated labor.

Urban infrastructure changed daily distance and time unevenly. Bochum gained a Bergisch-Märkische railway connection in 1860 and another railway route in 1874; the first tram, between Bochum and Herne, opened only in 1894.[1] Workers still tended to live near their pit or factory because walking was cheap and shift times were poorly served by public transport.[2] Water mains, gas lighting, streets, schools, and hospitals reached places on different timetables. At home, stoves, kettles, pots, buckets, wash tubs, irons, sewing tools, lamps, and storage furniture reduced no one's need for fuel, water, carrying, cleaning, and repair. Access depended on the dwelling and household means.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing marked work and status, but the Bochum evidence does not support one miners' or workers' costume. A posed 1899 photograph of a Zeche Hannover crew records individual workers and their outward appearance, yet group photographs were made occasions and may show cleaner or more formal garments than a shift required.[11] Mine, foundry, and yard clothing had to tolerate dust, damp, mud, oil, heat, or sparks; clerks, officials, and supervisors were expected to present themselves differently. Occupation, income, weather, and whether a person was at work, church, or being photographed all changed what was worn.

Household clothing work is better evidenced in broad outline than in precise Bochum wardrobes. Wool, cotton, linen, leather, and factory-made notions were available in the late-century market, while washing, brushing, patching, altering, and handing garments down extended their use. Laundry and mending consumed water, fuel, time, and usually women's labor. Sunday clothes could carry social meaning, but neither the survival of a photograph nor a municipal comment shows how many outfits a particular miner, servant, widow, or child owned.

Daily life in late 19th-century Bochum was shaped by the tight connection between coal, steel, migration, housing pressure, household labor, and uneven urban services. The surviving record is strongest for employers, municipal policy, mines, housing schemes, and organized labor. It is weaker for meals, clothing inventories, informal earnings, and the unrecorded negotiations inside households. What can be shown is not one typical routine but a set of unequal constraints: distance to work, secure rent, water and fuel, a wage vulnerable to injury or short time, and access to kin, lodgers, gardens, shops, churches, associations, or relief.

Related pages

References

  1. Stadt Bochum. Das 19. Jahrhundert – die Geschichte der Stadt Bochum, in Tag des offenen Denkmals 2011, pp. 7–10. Municipal overview used for the industrial, railway, utility, tram, and incorporation chronology. https://geodatenportal.bochum.de/bogeo/web/61/Doku/2011-07_Tag_des_offenen_Denkmals_2011.pdf
  2. Crew, David F. Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860–1914. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Based principally on records in the Stadtarchiv Bochum; used for economic cycles, occupations, household strategies, company housing, transport, and labor protest. https://orlis.difu.de/items/ebb82f7a-cb17-47f8-9e10-6c00ead437e2
  3. Lange, Carl. “Die Wohnungsverhältnisse der ärmeren Volksklassen in Bochum.” In Verein für Socialpolitik, Die Wohnungsnoth der ärmeren Klassen in deutschen Großstädten und Vorschläge zu deren Abhülfe, vol. 2, pp. 73–106. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1886. Contemporary municipal report; its promotional and administrative perspective is qualified in the text. https://doi.org/10.3790/978-3-428-57278-6
  4. Stadt Bochum, Untere Denkmalbehörde. “Denkmalgeschützte Siedlung Stahlhausen I / II.” Includes Yasemin Utku's account of construction phases, dwelling types, and surviving fabric. https://www.bochum.de/Denkmalschutz-/-Denkmalpflege/Denkmalliste-der-Stadt-Bochum/Siedlungen/Stahlhausen-I-/-II
  5. Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe. “Häuser für zuwandernde Bergleute.” LWL-Industriemuseum evidence from the 1897 Hordel directory and the houses at Am Rübenkamp. https://www.lwl.org/fremde-impulse-download/start/LWL/Kultur/fremde-impulse/die_impulse/Impuls-Arbeiterwohnhaeuser.html
  6. LWL-Museum Zeche Hannover. “Geschichte der Zeche Hannover” and museum overview. Institutional history of the colliery, the Koepe winding system, and the surviving 1893 steam winding engine. https://zeche-hannover.lwl.org/de/geschichte/; https://zeche-hannover.lwl.org/de/
  7. Landesarchiv NRW, Abteilung Westfalen, Oberbergamt Dortmund, no. 1774. “Arbeitsordnung für die Arbeiter der Steinkohlenzeche Hannover,” 30 October 1863. Digitized with commentary by the LWL Internet-Portal Westfälische Geschichte. https://www.westfaelische-geschichte.de/que1204
  8. BG Universitätsklinikum Bergmannsheil Bochum. “Unsere Geschichte.” Institutional chronology of the accident hospital founded in 1890. https://www.bg-kliniken.de/universitaetsklinikum-bergmannsheil-bochum/ueber-uns/bg-universitaetsklinikum-bergmannsheil-bochum/unsere-geschichte/
  9. Kubiak, Natalia. “Von polnischen Kumpels, ‘Polenzechen’ und ‘Ostarbeitern’ – Ein Blick auf 100 Jahre polnische Arbeitsgeschichte in Bochum (1871–1973).” Porta Polonica, January 2021. The article cites Bochum and Ruhr migration scholarship and distinguishes Polish-speaking Prussian migrants from later cross-border movements. https://www.porta-polonica.de/de/atlas-der-erinnerungsorte/von-polnischen-kumpels-polenzechen-und-ostarbeitern-ein-blick-auf-100?singlepage=yes
  10. Deutsche Berg- und Hüttenarbeiter-Zeitung, no. 44, 11 November 1899. Digitized by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Contemporary union press used cautiously for household labor and landlord dependence. https://library.fes.de/gewerkzs/bergbau-industrie/1899/pdf/1899-044.pdf
  11. Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, Internet-Portal Westfälische Geschichte. “Wirtschaft / Arbeit.” Includes the 1899 photograph Bergleute der Zeche Hannover I–II, Revier VIII, Bochum-Hordel, montan.dok/Fotothek 4748. https://www.lwl.org/westfaelische-geschichte/portal/Internet/finde/langDatensatz.php?urlID=167&url_tabelle=tab_websegmente