Kenneth J. Alford was actually Frederick J. Ricketts (1881-1945), a British composer and bandmaster. Trained at Kneller Hall, he went at to become the Director of Music for the Royal Marines at Plymouth. In the intervening years, he wrote dozens of marches and other works that made their way into the standard repertoire of military bands. He wrote many of these works under the Alford pseudonym, perhaps due to British military rules that discouraged officers from assuming other professional obligations. See more about him at his Wikipedia article.
Ricketts wrote Army of the Nile in 1941 as World War II was unfolding. Norman Smith gives an account of its origin in his Program Notes for Band:
This heroic-sounding march, with its quotes from The Last Post and Lights Out, was composed early in 1941, after one of the first Allied victories in World War II. Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939, and throughout most of 1940, Germany conquered one country after another. In Italy, Benito Mussolini was torn with jealously, afraid Adolf Hitler was on his way to total glory as well as total power. Having already defeated the natives of Ethiopia in 1935, Mussolini believed his 80,000 troops in North Africa could readily defeat the 30,000 British troops from the Army of the Nile (the Eighth Army) and thus further increase the number of Italian possessions on that continent. However, he failed to take into account the courage and stamina of the outnumbered Englishmen, Ulstermen, Cameron Highlanders, Sikhs, Pathans, and Hindus, as well as the cunning of Lt. General Richard Nugent O’Connor, a self-effacing little man who was one of Great Britain’s most outstanding military strategists. In December 1940, two of O’Connor’s Western Desert Divisions (the Fourth Indian and the Seventh Armored) completely routed Marshall Rodolfo Graziani‘s Italian troops. The victory was so complete that one of the British battalion commanders estimated his Italian prisoners as “five acres of officers and 200 acres of other ranks.”
A British wind band performs Army of the Nile:
The march is also popular among brass bands, as demonstrated in this live recording:
The quotes that Smith refers to in the program notes are bugle calls. Here is “The Last Post”:
And one version of “Lights Out,” more commonly known as “Taps”:
Army of the Nile is most readily available in an edition edited by Frederick Fennell. Read up on it at the Wind Repertory Project, Hal Leonard, and J. W. Pepper.