Philip,
GoogleEarth does have a feature to show historic imagery (you activate that by clicking on the little clock icon on the top of the screen--the one just to the left of the little sun icon). However, they don't have anything like a comprehensive catalog of the available historic aerial photography for any given location--I would guess that what they do have is whatever they could get their hands on that (a) didn't represent any legal issues and (b) covered areas with lots of people (ie, lots of google users!).
Sadly, in your course's case the oldest image available inside GoogleEarth is from Dec 30, 2005, so probably not really to your point. (You can check this for yourself by bringing up GoogleEarth, typing in 'Nuffield, UK in the 'Fly To' search tab (top left), then zooming in on the course (click on the plus sign that will appear once you move your cursor to the top right area of the screen, then click on the the little clock icon at the top bar--a transparent slider will appear just below the icon, and then slide the slider to the left as ar as it will go--which you'll find in your case is Dec 2005).
So if it's not already in GoogleEarth one is off to other sources to try to dig up what you are looking for. In the US the first stop for such a thing is generally historicaerials.com which is a for-profit site that gathers historic aerials and allows them to printed or copied for a fee. Right now this only covers the US and I'm not sure if there is an equivalent sit for the UK. From there one would generally search in governmental bodies and/or universities in the area. In the US there is no common standard of either storage or access yet unfortunately.
For instance, for my home course (Ardsley CC in Westchester County, NY) there is the following:
- GoogleEarth has 12 different aerials between 1994 and 2010, but nothing earlier--so not really helpful from a course history perspective
- Historicaerials.com has 4 different aerials with one as early as 1954 which is starting to get interesting
- and then the County Planning Department has aerials from 1926, 1940, 1947 and 1954 which is really interesting BUT to access those you actually have to make an appointment and then go sit at a computer inside the Planning Department's offices--these are available in electronic form but just not over the internet (?!) (and even then they are not available as gifs or jpgs just as pdfs).
Again, it may be that there are much better resources in the UK and someone else more knowledgeable may chime in with better advice?