JUST 50 years ago it was a male-only institution, full of 'sexually-frustrated' students, some of whom had been hand-picked for any number of reasons other than their academic ability – including their golf skills.

In some ways, Corpus Christi has changed more in the past half-century than it did in the 450 years which went before.

So, to celebrate its 500th birthday this year, Oxford University's smallest college commissioned alumnus Dr Stephen Hickey to compile a book of undergraduate reminiscences over the past six decades.

He escorted Pete Hughes through the quad and into the murky – and occasionally shocking – world of student life at Ed and David Milliband's alma mater.

SNEAKING out to go to late-night parties and having to scale the spiked gate to get back into college; a water gun attack on Oriel accomplished through an underground tunnel; herding Christ Church cows into Merton College grounds in the middle of the night: Stephen Hickey's compilation of undergraduate life at Corpus Christi College has all the rambunctious student adventures you could hope for.

But his finished work, The Great Little College, is more than that: it is also a tale of how a 500-year-old institution struggled into the 21st century, and a wider story of the changes in British Society in the past 50 years, made up of memories from 150 graduates of one Oxford college.

When asked for the most striking of those changes, Dr Hickey does not hesitate to respond: the arrival of women, which garners a whole chapter to itself.

"For people of my generation, which was all-male, if we come back to Corpus the most striking thing is the young women owning the place – as it were.

"During the time I was there it was almost unthinkable there should be women.

"It's a bit like the fall of the Berlin Wall: it happened so quickly, then people took it for granted."

Corpus Christi, like the rest of Oxford University, was founded as a male-only institution and remained so for hundreds of years.

The first women’s colleges at Oxford were established in the nineteenth century, and the first women became 'full members' of the university in 1920.

However individual colleges were still left to make their own decisions about the issue, and it wasn't until 1969 that Corpus admitted its first female member – philosophy lecturer Rosalind Hurstone (who the Oxford Mail regretfully described at the time as a '25-year-old girl').

The college admitted its first ten female students – all graduates – in 1970, and undergraduates followed.

Despite the fact that the change was happening everywhere, and Corpus wasn't even the first Oxford college to take the leap, some still found it hard to accept, as Dr Hickey's contributors recalled.

"There were interesting reflections from women who were among the first cohort: clearly some people struggled to cope with them.

"I think some of the women thought some of the men found them quite hard to deal with.

"What is true is that when you go back to the 1950s and '60s, peoples' assumptions of life and work were fundamentally different: women were seen to have a different role, that was taken for granted – civil service had a marriage bar."

That said, life in all-male institutions – for many men from their youngest schooldays right up until they left university – was not without its own challenges.

"The students in the 50s and 60s were often very sexually frustrated – even just meeting women was quite difficult.

"If you were a student at a single-sex college and you wanted a social life involving the opposite sex you had to go out of the college and go to parties or discos.

"If you wanted parties inside the college you had to 'import' women... it was all a bit artificial.

"By the 1980s you had much more social life inside the college with dances and parties."

If it seems shocking to think of a university ever banning women, younger readers might be equally shocked to learn exactly was something as basic as plumbing was like for young undergraduates.

Right up to the 1950s, Dr Hickey said: "There were some wonderful accounts of the years when you had to walk across the quad to go to the loo, and people had chamber pots in their rooms and the scouts would come and get them in the morning.

"It's quite a fundamental difference."

Often, he found, physical upgrades were driven not by students' discomfort, but by the profits to be made from 'the conference trade': hosting delegates in student rooms outside of term-time who expect 21st century en-suite facilities, which the students then enjoyed the benefits of.

The dramatic change in social welfare standards also sticks out in the book, from the era of discipline and stern rules to a more modern understanding of the pressures which undergraduates are under, ranging from exam stress to mental illness.

Throughout it all, Dr Hickey says his alma mater has retained a unique personality as the smallest kid on the block.

"The words a lot of people used were 'small' and 'friendly', and there was a very strong sense that although people came from very different backgrounds and had different interests, it was always friendly.

"One person said that even if you were not shy it was almost impossible not to make friends."

It is an enviable reputation which Corpus Christi will be hoping it can hold onto for another 500 years.

The Great Little College, published by Third Millennium, is available at Blackwells in Oxford or from Amazon as an e-book for £7.95.