From the archive: Angry grief in Liverpool following Hillsborough disaster

Fans returning to the club's famous Anfield ground wept at the foot of the huge ornamental gates dedicated to the late Bill Shankly, the former Liverpool manager, and topped with the legend 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.

A few wreaths of flowers had been left by well-wishers, and even fans of local rivals Everton came to pass on condolences to the bereaved who stood numb in the spring night.

A few anxious relatives waited for buses bringing back Liverpool supporters, clutching pathetic plastic bags, their eyes red-rimmed. Some had hospital tags on their wrists. One man searching for his son was shown a boy's jacket that had been left on the pitch. It wasn't his son's.

Relatives also waited late into the night at Lime Street station for Liverpool fans to return. When they did, they vented their anger on television camera crews, jostling them and shouting at them.

But some were intensely relieved. Ms Maria Kinsella threw her arms around her boyfriend, Mr Paul Fraughan, aged 20, who like many other fans was sharply critical of police handling of the crowd crush. 'They didn't have a clue how to cope,' he said.

As the full scale of the tragedy began to be understood there was also anger and anguish in the pubs. When the BBC 9 o'clock news was screened in one Lime Street pub, youths hurled obscenities at the set, shouting that the disaster was the fault of the police.

Pictures of young boys trapped behind the high steel barriers at the Sheffield soccer ground provoked a fresh wave of fury. Outside, in the street, police patrols appeared to have been stepped up. Knots of Liverpool supporters wandered aimlessly through the city centre, by turns too numb to talk or almost shouting at each other.

In the deserted Victorian terraces around Anfield stadium, families crowded round television sets in their homes as the death toll rose inexorably.

By the Shankly gates, an Everton supporter said: 'We came here to show we are sorry that something like this could happen. Something like this guts everybody.'

This is an edited extract